


Castaways

by Jameson9101322



Category: Halo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Halo 3, Unofficial Sequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-28
Updated: 2015-04-02
Packaged: 2018-03-15 14:09:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 26
Words: 28,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3449981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jameson9101322/pseuds/Jameson9101322
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Non-canon sequel to Halo 3 originally posted Oct 30, 2007.<br/>After being stranded on the far side of the galaxy, the Forward Unto Dawn crash lands on a deserted alien planet. Master Chief and Cortana must cobble a life for themselves out of the rubble as they await a long and unlikely rescue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Log01

Log01

Initiating Standard Thaw Cycle  
Thaw Cycle commencing in T-300  
Vital Signs real all-normal.  
Blood pressure 90/70 and rising  
Heart Rate holding steady at 45bpm

The pins popped on a UNSC cryo-containment pod in the jagged shadow of a mutilated drop ship fuselage. Within the coffin slumbered the galaxy's greatest super soldier; seven feet tall, a pillar of nerve and wire completely contained in a ton of green MJOLNIR armor. The last SPARTAN. John-117. The Master Chief.

Cortana watched vapor rise from the vents as his body temperature rose, paying close attention to his respiration and heart rate, and noting every integer of his rising blood pressure as if they were the most precious numbers in the world. The Master Chief was the only friend Cortana had left -- maybe the only one she’d ever had to start with.  His specs read all normal, but she learned long ago that when it came to humanity, figures could be misleading.  It wasn’t until his brain-scans began looking normal that she let herself relax.

The Chief pried himself out of the pod, every inch of skin burning from the sudden change in temperature.  He was on solid ground -- or at least there was gravity -- but apart from that nothing around him looked familiar. He turned to Cortana’s familiar purple light, even if he couldn’t quite get her in focus.  “Where are we?”

“Our inertia carried us into the gravity of  a planet the UNSC has charted as HK-154.  Not that that means much to us.  We’re light-years away from them now.”

The Chief stepped down onto the metal floor, his knees and ankles uncomfortably weak.  He didn’t like coming out of stasis, it made him feel vulnerable.  “How long was I out?”

“18 months.”

The Chief snapped his head toward her.  “Only 18 months!?  I said wake me up when you needed me not wake me up when you’re bored.”

“I woke you up when we survived a fiery landing onto this planet,”  she replied.  “And I was bored.”

“I’m glad to see you haven’t thought yourself to death.” 

“I took measures to prevent that.”  She answered matter of factly.  “I spent most the time rereading logs from the Halo missions and watching archived videos.”

“So you couch-potatoed your way through a year and a half.”  The ground was feeling more solid now. Everything was sore, but at least all his wounds and such had healed while in stasis.  He straightened to full height. 

She cocked her head to one side and fixed him with a soft smile.  “I missed you.”

The faintest bit of a smile stretched unseen behind his face place.  “So, why did you wake me, really?”

“Our electrical reserves were nearly obliterated in the crash,”  Cortana explained.  “I am currently running on battery power.  I didn’t want to die out while you slept, and I didn’t want to leave you sleeping until there wasn’t enough power left to wake you.”

“How about our beacon?”

“I’m rerouting whole power to it now.”  She said.  “Give me five seconds after I close down to set the subroutines then yank me.”

“Right.”

He watched the seconds on his HUD, then pulled Cortana’s chip from the pedestal and inserted into a slot at the back of his head.  

Her voice filled his mind instead of his ears.  “That’ll take care of that for a little while at least.”

“What do we do now?”

“We need to find an alternate power source,”  Cortana said.  “We’ve got a lot of useless parts in the walls of this ship.  We can construct some kind of transducer even if all we have is solar power. I can pull up topographical scans from the UNSC research library.  It won’t be exact.  Humankind has yet to make it out this far.”

“Noted.”  The Chief dislodged his Assault Rifle from the mangled wall mounting and checked the clip.  Near empty.  It still had some of the orange sticky from Installation 04 ground into the handle.  “At least we know what we won‘t find.”

“What‘s that?”

“Sentient life.”


	2. Log02

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The hunt for power.

log02

The terrain was almost exactly like it had been on the Ark, which was almost exactly like it had been on the Halos, which was almost exactly like it had been on Earth. The grass was green, the trees were tall and strong, the sky was blue with wisps of cloud and a white warm sun shining peacefully over the land. 

Despite the unassuming quaintness, there was one obvious difference between HK-154 and the Master Chief's previous previous locations; the complete lack of sound. Chief considered this over the white noise of Cortana’s constant chattering. There was typically a natural ambience in forests; the chirp of birds, the buzzing of insects, perhaps the bark or howl of some native mammal prowling in the distance, but when he and the Arbiter fired the Ring back at the Ark, the white light of supposedly divine purification killed all the local critters for what could have been hundreds of worlds. Earth was not in range at the time, nor, the Chief assumed, were any of the covenant homeworlds, but this planet had been, and the silence was unsettling. 

He focused back to his in-house companion, who was in the middle of a long stream of statistics. “ – so it's relatively similar to Earth in respect to tilt and rotation, which equalizes the pull of gravity up to a variation of 1.4 percent. Soil samples suffer slight differences. The chemical makeup of the topsoil shows a different mixture of natural minerals, but everything checks out for healthy human consumption. The vegetation here might even be more nutritious for you than Earth produce! You will have to give me a taste analysis when the time comes for that, but at least you won’t go hungry, right?”

“Mmhmn.”

“Unfortunately the atmosphere does not have the proper balance of oxygen to other elements so it’s not safe for you to breathe, but the elements are there in varying amounts. I’m working on a filtration system for your armor that will be able to translate the HK-154 atmosphere into breathable reserves for you to recycle. That way your tanks won’t run empty in case we’re stuck here a long time. If it works, I’ll also be able to draw up design specs for an area-filter so perhaps you can eat the aforementioned flora without holding your breath.”

“That sounds convenient.”

“I’m very much looking forward to that taste analysis.”

“And tracking it all the way down I’m sure.”

Her reply was a little too anxious. “Yes, that too.” 

“I’m not a source of entertainment for you, Cortana,” he said. “I know you’ve been lonely, but I didn't sign up for mad-scientist food studies.”

“I’d never put you in any danger, Chief!” Cortana reassured him. “I’m curious about what would happen, that’s all.”

“If our luck improves it will give me super powers and let me fly around.”

“You’re lucky, but not THAT lucky.”

They walked through the wooded glade along a free-flowing natural stream. Cortana had located what most likely was a waterfall somewhere in this area. If the fall was strong enough, it would be an excellent place to set up a waterwheel or something for charging batteries. While this would have been ideal, the state of the stream was not looking favorable. If there was a powerful waterfall in the area, it most definitely was not feeding this flow. 

He noticed Cortana was still talking. “ONI dismissed this quadrant years ago as low priority, even before the war with the Covenant. It was too far from Alpha Quadrant to colonize. I wonder if we would have made it here if we were left on our own to expand. Imagine... a future where humankind has covered the entire galaxy!”

“Manifest Destiny at its best.” The Chief noted. “We’ve terra-formed worse places than this. Although it’d need a better name than Heck A-Hundred and Fifty Four.”

“Maybe after something in History or Earth Mythology,” Cortana offered. “Mankind does love to name things symbolically from the past.”

The SPARTAN shrugged in his MJOLNIR armor. “Or after some scientist or his mother.”

The stream led them out of the forest toward a steep bluff. A thin waterfall was pattering down from the plateau above like a flickering silver chain from the sky. The faucet-like falls emptied into a pond and then into their stream. The Chief stared up the waterfall with disappointment. “This won’t do us much good.”

“You’re right,” Cortana agreed. “We’ll just have to keep looking.”

He turned and headed along the bluffs. There was a fairly substantial ice cap on the mountains above, perhaps their hydro-kinetic power source was near by. Trough the trees to the left he spotted a shape not native to a forest. 

Cortana spotted it too. “Is that –?”

“It has to be.” 

It was a cabin, as small and quaint as any fairytale. The Chief cased the area around it, looking for signs of life he knew would not be there. The building was made of stone with a shingled wooden roof and delicate landscaping. A well sat nearby, but closer examination proved it to be more of a set-piece than a functioning mechanism. The Chief looked down at it from above, standing nearly a foot and a half taller than the point of its tiny little roof. “I guess this means there was intelligent life on this planet.”

“I guess so,” Cortana agreed. She sounded distracted. “I’m picking up something weird, Chief. Some kind of a signal. I hadn’t noticed it until now. Move closer to the house.”

He was already on his way. The door to the building gave the Chief a sense of proportion. He was tall for a human, but this door only came to chest level on him and was rounded along the top in what he had the feeling was a specific brand of alien architecture. The frame was shaped like an Omega as were all the windows along the walls. The peak of the roof was nearly twelve feet high and at the very top was a fixed weathervane and what looked to be a radio antenna. 

“The signal, Chief. It’s transmitting to that receptor.”

“Could there still be people alive?” 

“Highly unlikely,” she replied. “Climb up there and fix the antenna, I want to put my ears on.”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s not like you’re trespassing. You won’t be bothering anyone and no one will see you if you look ridiculous. Now climb.”

He secured his Assault Rifle across his back and jumped up onto the roof. His heavily plated food went straight through the weak shingles and sent him tumbling into the structure. He landed on his side in an ornate glass table with bits of roof debris showering down on top of him.

He closed his eyes and let his helmet clunk against the metal table leg. “Why do I listen to you?”

“Did I tell you to jump?” 

He shoved his way back to his feet, bits of splintered wood falling from chinks in his armor like pine needles. The architecture style thankfully encouraged high-vaulted ceilings, and the Chief could rise to full height without restraint. He looked up through the skylight he’d just made. “Not a soul alive to care, yet somehow I’m still embarrassed.”

“There's a terminal by the wall, Chief. Check it out.” 

The terminal was little more than a screen and a couple buttons on the wall. He knelt down to take a look. 

“Turn it on.” 

He paused before the unfamiliar controls. 

“Please?”

“You feeling guilty about ordering me around?” 

“Perhaps. I just got you back, I don’t want you to be mad at me.”

“You seem more human than usual, Cortana.” He watched the little screen flicker to life with various alien dots and lines that both did and did not remind him of covenant shorthand. 

“It’s a dialect of one of the Covenant languages," Cortana said. "More specifically the Unggoy.”

“Grunts?”

“Seems that way. This is an unusual place for them to live. The Unggoy homeworld is an icebox covered in methane gas. This is far too temperate and, frankly, cute for Grunts.”

“A relative perhaps?”

“Or maybe something like a trading partner. Close interactions with the Unggoy would foster the development of similar written language.”

“Why do I get the feeling that these people probably thought it up first.”

“From what I can tell they called this planet Kgorr, or at least this country Kgorr, or maybe the people living in this house Kgorr. It’s hard to understand by this simple message. Wait. Scroll down.” The Chief punched a button and the screen changed. Cortana huffed. “You pressed the menu button. Wait.” Her icy presence buzzed as she ran rapid calculations in the back of his head. “Chief there’s a city close by! A big one!”

“How close?”

“About seven kilometers latitudinal East.” She replied. “Chief, if there is a fully functioning city on this planet, they would have food, water, power – everything we could need!” She triangulated the distance and put up a new navigation point. “Perhaps you really ARE that lucky.”


	3. Log03

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Signs of life

Log03

Before them lay thirty blocks of alabaster columns and blank white walls. Standing at the front gates was like standing at the edge of a sun-bleached mausoleum erected in the place of thousands of individual headstones. For some reason, he felt terrible.

Cortana scanned the area with the suit's limited sensors. “As far as I can tell, they call it the city of Cant.”

“The City of Can’t? That’s a pessimistic name.”

“Its another language, Chief, it probably means something totally different.”

He blew a puff of air and clouded the inside of his faceplate. “Might as well called it the City of Won’t. Or the city of Who the Hell Cares?”

The streets were well kept, but stained with patches of heavy black liquid. Fallen shopping bags and et cetera littered the ground. The Chief imagined the creatures holding these objects unexpectedly obliterated. Cortana analyzed the constant radio signal and reported her findings as she received them. “This is the largest city on HK-154. There are smaller cities on the continents to the west and south, but map information is limited. The locals call themselves the Unggai and are indeed a relative of the Unggoy, albeit very very far removed. From what I can tell, they haven’t been in contact with other intelligent races for centuries.”

“And we wiped out their homeworld.” The Chief passed an alien-shaped toy doll half covered by an abandoned newspaper. “Flash genocide - a whole race of creatures gone.”

“This wasn’t a homeworld, it was a colony.”

“Whatever.”

Her voice sharpened with authority. “Lighting the ring was necessary to kill the Flood. There’s nothing else we could have done. We destroyed the Ark and maybe hundreds of worlds like this to keep the parasite from spreading.”

“Thanks Cortana, that really helps.”

“Would you honestly have kept from firing it if you knew this planet was here?”

“I’m not a hero, Cortana. I’m closer to Spark’s Reclaimer than I will ever be to humanity’s Savior.”

Her voice was concerned and disappointed. “But, you did save them, Chief.”

He was quiet for a long time. Cortana wished sharing his neural net meant she could read his mind. Regardless, whatever was bothering him was also bothering her. She wondered if this was a side effect to interfacing. For some reason it was really important to her that he be okay with what they had done. 

Chief took in the layout of the streets. There was nothing alien about the planning of the place, every block was evenly spaced with roads branching off at right angles leading from the main road where they walked. His avenue was lined in shops and businesses, all empty except for the ghosts of the dead and unclaimed merchandise. At the end of the road was a plot of open pavement and a pair of giant electrical turbines set back from the sidewalk as if their constructors were trying to hide them from the rest of the skyline. The turbines were still running, their technicians in no position to turn them off. The Master Chief smirked. “That’s a nice waterfall.”

“This is exactly what we need.” Cortana agreed. “An energy source of that size might power our beacon indefinitely. All we need is a way to get the transmitter here to hook it up.”

“I’m strong, but I can’t carry half a ship,” the Chief said. He headed through the bounding fence and into the open lot to explore. Near the building was the first vehicle he’d seen yet; a ten-wheeled mini monster with a rear-mounted utility hook. The Chief peered into the driver’s side door and found the key stuck plainly in the ignition. “I think I'll call it The City of I’m-Going-To-Steal-This-Crane.”

Cortana thought his wit was twice as funny as usual. “Go for it, Chief!”

He peeled the cab open like a sardine can, ripped out the seat, which was several sizes too small for him and climbed in. The space was still a little snug, so he sat on his ankle and hung one leg out the enlarged door to free up room. He started the battery-powered engine, figured out how to clock it into reverse, then pressed one hand to the floor-mounted gas pedal and pulled the joystick to get it in gear. The machine backed out over the fence, executed a perfect 3-point turn and trundled off down the street. 

Cortana accessed the radio channel and local national archives. There she found a complete topological survey with altitude, forest mapping and weather charts. “Go out the back, Chief, there’s a valley and a prairie that lead straight back to our crash site.”

“Just tell me where to turn.”

The crane crawled slowly out of town, obviously not intended to move at speed. He lodged the butt of his assault rifle between the dashboard and the gas pedal, then sat back against the rear of the cabin to enjoy the ride. Cortana relaxed as well and continued to stream the information from the Unggai wireless network. There was a complete history on the race, catalogs of art and music, and archives of news broadcasts. Although it was tempting, she fought the urge to share these things with her human companion. He’d never been one to stay angry or sad about anything, but the short moments when he wasn’t a happy neutral were strange and unsettling to her. She set a reminder for herself to puzzle why later. For now she was happy to stream new information and enjoy his company. 

The Chief made sure his makeshift autopilot was working properly then closed his eyes and let himself doze. For the first time in a long time he wasn’t bitterly exhausted. Stasis was never considered a ‘good night’s sleep’, but after months of endless battle in various places the year and a half’s rest was very much appreciated. He let his arms drop to his sides, his firearm otherwise occupied in a uniquely un-warlike task. He never expected that it would feel good to be unarmed. 

This planet was empty, and he let himself be glad of that. There was nothing to kill or be killed by. It was just him alone. Cortana called him out of his moment’s peace with a wary tone. It snapped him back into lightning-fast awareness in a fraction of a second.

“Chief you need to see this.”

He yanked the gun from the dash and stood in the open doorway, the crane coasting slowly to a stop in the tall grass. He leveled the rifle over the roof of the cab for a sweep and was stunned by what he saw. 

The valley below his rise was coated in blood. Smoke rose from a shattered bit of alien spacecraft laying in various pieces along the line of impact. The hull was still seeping a sickening familiar noxious green gas from its compartments. 

There was nothing left of the bodies. The combat forms had been vaporized by the affect of the ring, but their slimy paths through the grass still smelled of the same orange rot he’d seen consume and destroy both enemies and allies in hellish waves of animated corpses. They’d been headed toward the town. 18 months ago they were marching through the blue-brown patches of fresh Unggai blood and taking the locals for their own.

The Master Chief stared at the valley at length, waiting for even one infection form to slither into view. None ever came. Any surviving Flood were either starved to death or scattered over the continent on an 18 month forage. Still, the Chief would not let himself flinch. The Flood was the most evil and destructive force in the universe, and there would be no room for peace where the smallest possibility of its survival existed.

Cortana could sense no Flood activity in range of Cant’s local radar scanners or weather towers. There was no trace of the Flood in any of the city’s current event or archived reports. She found a law-enforcement order to send investigators to a meteorite landing site outside of town. That had been ten minutes before her personal record cataloged the Halo reaction. Triangulating the distance, it would have only taken ten more for the first of the Combat forms to reach the clean white doorstep of Cant proper. 

“It had just started when we set the ring. We stopped the invasion at its beginning.” She paused as he slowly lowered the gun from his sights. “So in a way you saved them too. Better to die quickly from the ring then to endure the horror and torture of being infected by the Flood.”

He hung his head and retreated back into the cab. “We need to get that beacon going.” He put the machine back in drive and pushed the pedal to the floor. This time he used his foot.


	4. Log04

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The antenna.

Log04

Forward Unto Dawn -- once the UNSC's finest -- now nothing more than the butt end crashed into a million tiny pieces. The Chief rooted through the wreckage recovering what he could and loading it onto a huge sled-like chunk of fuselage. Cortana was most interested in the signal tracker that was broadcasting their distress beacon, but her human companion made sure to recover airtanks, MREs, computer equipment, and the holographic stand the AI had used to manifest herself the last time they spoke face to face.

He rigged it all to the tow hook of the ten-wheeler and made his way back toward Cant. The ride to the crash site had turned cramped in a hurry, so he clamped the gas pedal down with a brick of refuse and stood on the runner as he hung out the window. Cortana was chattering cheerfully in his head.

"We'll have to get to work right away. We need to hook the receptor to the generator, but once that's installed we should be able to increase output up to 1000 percent! Earth might even hear us this time!"

"That's encouraging."

The crane moved its way toward town, the Chief steering one-handed through the open doorway. The sled scraped a path toward the power plant where he let his foot off the gas and hopped from the cab tot he gravel. The vehicle plowed through a line of fencing and dragged to a stop just shy of hitting the wall. 

Cortana whistled in his head. “Good aim.”

The transmitter was still hooked to a three-foot tall battery unit. Chief stacked the pieces in his arms and carried toward the door. “The sooner its broadcasting the sooner we get out of here.” He stopped when his load collided with the top of the low doorway. Cortana snickered but he ignored her and stooped down through the door at a squat.

With instruction from the AI, the networking system was relatively easy. Ironically, Unggai technology was theoretically similar to late-1900s Earth, so with the added benefit of Cortana’s historical lectures the signal was pumped upward through a radio antenna erected at the top of the building out of salvaged steel rigging. Everything completed, the Chief stared upward at his creation with a surprising lack of satisfaction.

“This is great!” Cortana congratulated. “It’s got enough megahertz to suit our purposes, and it’s a very handsome construction if I do say so myself.” 

The Chief’s eye moved from the top of the antenna to the sky above. “Is this it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is there any more we can do?” He asked. “A way to speed the process up?”

“It’s a waiting game, Chief.”

“Can we make it taller?”

“We can, but its going to take just as long to get to Earth.”

“Would it be a stronger signal?”

“If we hook up another generator.”

He nodded and headed downstairs. “Then we'll do that.”

Cortana sounded unexpectedly amused. “Restless?”

“I’m surprised you’re not.”

“I’m fine. I’m happy to have someone to talk to.”

“I have an aversion to stagnancy,” the Chief said. “Standing still is counterproductive.”

“Exhausting yourself is too. We’ve done a lot today. Maybe you should take a break.”

“I’m fine.” He said. “Rest might as well be hibernation and I’m not in the mood to go back to that at the moment.”

“I guess I can understand that.”

The two of them rigged up another generator, added another fifty feet of height to the antenna, and rigged an intricate support system to steady it. When they were done, the Chief sat himself down on the edge of the rooftop and looked down over the ruined fence and gravel courtyard to the rest of the town. Cortana hummed in his ear, it made him feel like she was sitting there next to him with her legs over the edge like a normal, human woman. “So now what, Chief?”

“I don’t know. Suggestions?”

“I’m still working on the methane-to-oxygen converter schematics, so we can’t start working on that yet.” She took a moment to consider her partner. “What do you want to do?”

“What do I want?” The Chief asked. It was an interesting concept, one he hadn’t considered before -- maybe in his entire life.

“Yeah.” Cortana encouraged. “This is the ultimate get-away. Your own private planet. You can do things you’ve always wanted to but never had the chance.”

Cortana could feel his mind working and hoped he would reach a conclusion out loud. 

The Chief relaxed, delving to the deepest parts of his heart. “I don’t have much that I’ve ‘always wanted’. I’m a drone in that sense. I’ve only wanted to do my job and look out for my team.” He smirked behind his visor. “Now I have no team and I have no job. What I really want I guess is to want something.”

“Now’s your chance to try.”

He was silent again for a little while. When he finally spoke it was in a ‘whatever’ tone Cortana hadn’t heard before. “I’ve never lived in a house.”

“There you go! You’ve got tons of houses to choose from. Let’s go pick a house!”

“House hunting.” He shook his head and stood up. “We’ll see how good I am at this...”


	5. Log05

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> House Hunting

Log05

For how much Cant looked like an Earth city, the Master Chief swiftly discovered tastes in neighborhood planning between the humans and the Unngai varied enough to confuse the poor SPARTAN as he wandered the streets looking at houses. All the buildings were white fronted with arch-like doors. The Chief couldn’t tell what was the business district and what was the residential district. He finally found a building with an over-emphasized entryway and paused. Cortana assessed his choice. “You go for grand huh?”

“The doorway is bigger. I’m not crawling into my house.”

“It would be like a club house!” Cortana chuckled. “A crawl-in hole and a password...”

“That would only be useful if there was someone to keep out.” He ducked under the door and into the grand foyer which was built in the round like a beehive. Paintings of Unggoy-sized creatures in dramatic poses cycled about the place. The Master Chief could feel Cortana’s manic curiosity whirring to life. 

“I think you’ve found a historic building! Maybe a museum or government building!”

“Fantastic.” The Chief traipsed toward a door in the back. “I can be the mayor of Cant.”

“Wait! Where are you going!?” Cortana cried as he ducked the inner door frame. “I want to study the murals!”

“Later.”

The back room was something like a forum space with round benches circling a set of central seats. The vaulted ceilings came to a point no more than a meter above his head. He kicked one of the benches aside to make sure they weren’t bolted down and nodded with satisfaction. “This will do.”

“One room is not a house, Chief.” Cortana said. 

“I can move around in it, right now that’s all I can ask for.”

“Alright, I can’t argue with that. It’ll give me a chance to study that antichamber.”

“I’m glad it suits you.” He kicked the benches to the walls to clear space and sat against the back wall to stare out his new bedroom doorway. It felt like the rooftop all over again, and this planet felt no more like home. “Now what?”

“Well, we’ll need to furnish it and decorate and personalize it,” Cortana said. “Make it feel like you.”

He actually stifled a laugh, something he hadn’t experienced since he was too young to be useful. “Feel like me?”

“Yeah, make it a home.”

“How on Heck are you going to do that?”

“We’re going to do it, Chief -- together! We’ll go out into the city, find things you like, bring them back, hang them on the walls or set them in the house somewhere... When we’re done, the place will say “John 117” so loud strangers can hear it!”

“What strangers?”

“Come on, Chief.” Cortana sounded like she was pouting. “I’m trying to help you out.”

“I’m sorry, Cortana.” He shoved up from the floor. “I guess I can’t get excited about home decor.”

“I could make a joke about Spartan living...” Cortana ventured. “But I’ll let you make one for yourself.”

“They’ve been made. Many times.”

Cortana sighed. “If you’re not going to let me live out my dream of being an interior decorator, what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to move in.”

“You reconsidered? So fast?”

He marched through the antichamber and back to the street. “Trust me, it’s not what you think.”

***

Days on HK-154 were of similar length to Earth thanks to the proportional size and rotation of the planet to humanity’s home-world. This provided less sunlight than the Chief was used to, having grown up on Reach and fought on various other planets and constructs. That said, it was dark before he had completed work on his bedroom.

“I have to hand it to you, Chief,” Cortana congratulated, “you may not be a designer, but you’ve made me feel at home.”

“You ready to try it out?” His helmet lights moved from the hardware he was working on to the open switch on the power cord by the wall. He turned on the electricity and watched the point lights in the console activate.

Cortana grinned warm in his head. “Go for it.”

The Chief reached up to the back of his helmet and slid out the AI’s storage chip. Immediately the tingling presence in the back of head dissolved, leaving him feeling strangely alone. He plugged the card into the console and watched as the shimmering form of his companion took shape on the holo-pad. “Better?”

“Feels great.” She nodded, smiling. “Its good to stretch my legs a bit.”

“Try and access the airwave network.” The Chief instructed. “I’ll open the breakers.”

“Right.” Cortana stretched out to feel the analog signal broadcasting not only across the globe of the planet, but out toward UNSC space. She felt a console in the foyer switch on, then a sudden enlightenment as the thick length of cable stretching the distance between Chief’s house and the power plant opened. She could access all the information in the computers there, read the power levels and signal strengths, she could fly there at a thought.

The Chief returned, ducking under the door, his headlamps tracking his head motion as he surveyed the room. “How’s that?”

“Fantastic,” she replied. “Hold on, let me get the lights.” She accessed the grid and switched on the overhead light, which was little more than a glassless tube filament that lit the room in a dim cyan color. 

The Chief killed his headlamps. “Thanks.”

“You’ve done an excellent job, here, Chief,” Cortana said. “I couldn’t be happier.”

“You really are sounding more human.” He considered the possible reasons. “Why?”

“I don’t know, I guess I’m learning.” 

He sat down against the wall again. He’d been too busy to bother making himself a bed. “Was it something... With the Gravemind?” Her response was more than just a feeling in his head this time, he could see her close herself to the suggestion, her posture shrinking back and her eyes searching the wall. He looked away. “Never mind, forget I mentioned it.”

She seemed glad to. “Are you going to sleep there on the floor?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“We could drag your cryopod in here and keep the lid up.”

“I’ll let you know when I need a coffin. The floor will be fine.”

“Tough as nails as always.” She looked fondly on him. “I guess this is goodnight?”

He slouched and nodded. “I’ll wake myself this time.”


	6. Log06

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A monument to our salvation

Log 06

It was longest month of his life; longer than when he was fighting an endless war, longer than any period of training or recuperation or surveillance. It was the longest month in the history of mankind. 

Cortana had the Unngai frescoes pretty much figured out. The Chief heard every minute detail of her referencing and cross-referencing as she attempted to make the paintings tell a story. He’d listened patiently, but couldn’t have cared less if his life depended on it. 

In an effort to drive off the boredom, the Master Chief had turned his attention to the radio antenna, making it taller and sturdier as time went on. He was halfway up his two-hundred meter structure, limbs woven into the framework like four more pieces of recovered metal when Cortana paged him from the ground. “Good news, Chief, we’ve filtered enough oxygen to power your tanks for another three months! You can put them in storage as soon as you come down.”

The Chief locked his homemade pulley system in place and ran a length of cable through it. “Alright.”

“And, pray tell me, when ARE you coming down?”

He tugged the cord and a piece of thick metal piping began its long journey upward. “When I’m done.”

“I’m starting to believe you’ll never be done.”

He mused to himself and continued to hoist.

Cortana rolled her eyes. “You know height has its advantages, but the signal is still limited by its output strength...”

“Don’t tell me that.”

“You’ve got to face facts, Chief.”

“I don’t have to do anything.” He tugged the cord with more vigor. “But I’ve got to do something.”

“You’re such a child.” 

He sobered a little and focused on his work. Cortana measured his silence and dismissed him with a sigh. There was nothing else she could do here. “I’m going to watch the weather. Page me when you come down.”

“Alright.”

“I’ll tell you if a tornado is going to blow you off.”

He resettled himself in the scaffolding. “I’ll be fine.”

***

A flash of brightness engaged the automatic screen dimmers in his helmet. The Master Chief winced an eye open and saw the sunrise over HK-154.

He’d fallen at the top of the tower. Below the entire city of Cant was in view, the white walls painted pink with dawn hues. Looking down made him dizzy for a second, but all it took him was a minute to get his bearings and put him back in control. He pulled his feet out of the structure and began his way back down. “Cortana?”

“Chief!” She sounded relived. “I thought you’d died up there.”

“You know better than that.”

“What were you doing?”

“Resting apparently.” He paused and noticed the pulley cord waving in the wind. “I’m good now.”

“Good,” she said flatly. “Great.”

He grabbed the line and repelled the rest of the way down. Five minutes later he planted his boots on the roof of the power plant. Cortana was waiting for him on a tiny homemade holo-pad with her arms crossed. “And what, may I ask, was that about?”

“What’s done is done.”

She relaxed her posture and broke into a wide smile. “You’re embarrassed!” 

He shifted weight a little and made her laugh out loud. He couldn’t hide his body language behind his mask. 

“You are! You’re embarrassed about sleeping on the job!”

“Stop.”

She recovered her composure. “Well, I think it’s tall enough. You know, now that it’s a two day trip.”

“I guess so.” He sighed. “And that ends the list of things to do.”

Cortana put a hand to her chin. “How about storing those oxygen tanks from yesterday?” He nodded slightly and headed downstairs. Cortana kept talking to him over comlink. “I’m sorry, I know that’s not the excitement you were craving...” The Chief didn’t answer. He reached the ground floor and she rematerialized in a more sophisticated holo-pad. “Chief?”

“Hm?”

“Are you okay?”

He removed the tanks from the wall-sized filtration system and loaded them with nearly thirty other tanks of the same size. Doing so felt like storing away weeks of his life.

Cortana didn’t like his silence. “Are you mad because I teased you? I didn’t mean anything by it...” He returned from his task and stopped to stand by her pedestal. At that angle she thought he seemed very tall. “Chief?”

“I’m going to take another lap around this continent.” He announced. He looked down at her, and even through his mask she could tell he wasn’t angry. “You want a ride?”

She smiled and nodded, beginning shutdown sub-processes. He pulled her chip from the pedestal and inserted it again in the back of his head. She woke in his mind. “We probably won’t find anything.”

He checked the ammo in his MAB5 even though he hadn’t fired a shot since they’d landed. “We didn’t last time.”

“Its very SPARTAN of you to be so vigilant.” She said. “Never let your guard down for a moment do you?”

“Only on the tops of radio antennas.”

They marched across the landscape, past the Flood ship, past the wreckage of the Dawn, and off toward the eastern coast. At the edge of a bluff he stopped and looked back. The distress beacon glinted brightly in the morning sun, its excessive height a physical representation of the best he could do to get himself rescued. He was sorry to be done with it.


	7. Log07

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing but time

Log 07

“Infinity.”

“Space.”

“Idealism.”

“A shotgun and fifty brutes in a straight line.”

Cortana laughed in the Chief‘s head. “Okay, I’ll do a harder one.” 

It was the morning of the second month on HK-154. The two of them were on their morning patrol, traversing the same foot-worn path for the hundred-something-th time since the crash. 

”How about 'Art'.”

“Pointless.”

“Pointless!?” Cortana cried. 

The Chief grinned. “I thought it was supposed to be the first thing that pops into my head.”

“It is, but 'pointless'?” She asked. “Art is supposed to be deeply symbolic and personally significant.”

“We weren’t taught art appreciation in killing school.” 

“Okay. Artistic Representation.”

“Blue, purple and green spattered in arches across a rock wall.”

“Wow!”

His grin slacked at the ironic tone in her voice. “Around the crater of a spent fragmentation grenade. Obviously.”

“I must be rampant not see that coming.”

“Dead people saw that coming.”

“Fine. Instinctive response.”

“Sniping a grunt through the trees while in freefall.”

“I’m beginning to see a pattern.”

“Beginning to?”

The southern ocean was visible over the coming rise. Cortana “Hyperspace Trajectory Equations.”

“Cryosleep.”

“Defenestration.”

“Following my shoulder through a pane of glass.”

“Redemption.”

“Regret.” He replied. “Truth, Mercy and Reconciliation.”

She rolled her eyes. “Almost had you.”

“You mention any kind of dogmatic terminology my mind will shoot straight to the Covenant.”

“Historical Significance.”

“Sparta,” he replied. “The first one not the remake.”

“Heartlessness.”

“A merciless death.”

“Okay then, Mercy.”

“A bullet in your head not your chest.”

“Transcendental Migration.” 

“Whales.” The Master Chief replied. 

Cortana paused a moment. “Whales?”

“Holy Whales.” He said. “To cover the transcendental part.”

She was flabbergasted, even though this was what she was aiming for. “But Whales? After all that?”

“Whales migrate. It’s the first thing that popped into my head.”

“These aren’t alien whales? Or the undead corpses of whales floating form continent to continent?”

“Why would I think of either of those things?”

“Never mind.”

His heavy MJOLNIR boots came to a stop in the brown coastal sand. The waves of the foreign sea stopped short of his footprints before retreating back to shores unknown. On the first thirty or so visits to the southern end of his private continent, he imagined alien life somewhere on the other side of the sea. He never told Cortana, she'd remind him it was impossible, still deep down, part of him longed for someone to make contact with. It was hard to accept all life in this quadrant of space was gone. The breadth of the ocean could not have spared any Unngai from the cleansing power of the Halo. After two months of the same disappointment, he looked at the ocean with little more than acknowledgment of its existence. 

To his surprise, Cortana whispered in his head. “Imagine if there was someone out there.”

"There's not."

“But if there were... I’ve learned a lot about these people while we’ve been here. They might have made good allies, if we could convince them that you weren’t a monster.” She played the scenario out in her head. “You’re probably five feet taller than they were. And you can’t take off your mask in this atmosphere. It might be a tough negotiation.”

“Not to mention I’ve got a woman who lives in my head and tells me what to do.” He turned from the shore. “Let’s not dwell on it.”

“You’ve been really down lately, can I help?”

He marched up the sand dunes back to terra firma and continued his lap around the world. “You’ve done all you can.”

“But you are down.” She said. “You can talk to me if you want.”

“I don’t have much of a choice.”

The words cut deep. It was a peculiar response for an AI, but at the same time felt like it was wholly justified and natural. “What? Am I unsatisfactory company Mr. 117?”

“It’s nothing, Cortana.”

“Are you lonely? I can understand if you are.”

“I said it’s nothing.”

The pain at her core was still there, but dissipating. She ran a diagnostic on herself, but left its monitoring to a subroutine. “Why is it so hard to admit that you’re lonely?”

He didn’t want to answer. Perhaps if he ignored her, she'd let the topict die on the table like every other time she took interest in his mental health, but the concerned tone in her voice sounded like more than artificially simulated sincerity. It was true. 

“Chief?”

“I’m ready to go home,” he said. “I’m done with this planet. I’m ready for it to all be over.”

“We’ve done all we can do, the beacon’s up and...” She stopped. Somehow she knew it wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “I’m sorry.”

He paused and stared a the ground. Cortrana waited, discouraged to be looking down when their hope was in the sky. The Chief turned away from his well-worn path and toward his radio antenna towering in the distance -- a monument to a rescue that he was beginning to suspect would never come. “We’re going back to town.”

“You don’t want to check the western coast?”

“I’ve seen it.”

“But...you never leave anything half done. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m angry," he said, tone sharp. “Don’t bother me.”

Saying it aloud made the anger stronger now. Cortana didn’t like it, and she didn’t like being in there with it. “Chief -- ”

“Stop.”

She slid into silence. Her background scan concluded all-clear, but she felt worse than ever.


	8. Log08

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Strain

Log08

Upon their return to town, the Master Chief marched into the power plant, whipped out Cortana's chip, stuck it in the holopad, and headed for his quarters to fume. Through the magic of power lines, she beat him there.

“Chief, talk to me. What’s wrong?”

“I said drop it.”

“No, I won’t! We’ve been stranded on this planet a long time, and I’ve done enough research to know what solitude does to a person.”

“Stop.” He plodded through the room, hit his head on the low door frame. Backing out, he wound up and punched through the upper part of the wall, irrevocably damaging a fresco of two alien figures throwing rose petals. He stormed into his bedroom, grumbling about how a person should be able to move through his own house.

Cortana appeared on the holopad. “You’re losing your cool, Chief. Sit down, take a deep breath, and get yourself under control.”

“Leave me alone.” He stormed past her to his bed; a mattress-sized pad of cloth-stuffed pillows and recovered linen from the surrounding buildings and pulled out an Unngai-sized backpack. Into this satchel he began loading food and supplies.

Cortana frowned. “What are you doing?”

“I’m leaving.”

“What? Where? Why?” She didn’t know whether to be angry or frightened. “You can’t run, there’s no where to go! What are you running from!?”

“I said drop it!” 

She recoiled. “There’s something wrong with you. The Master Chief I know doesn’t yell and doesn’t run… You’ve got to calm down or you’re going to hurt yourself.”

"Enough." He slung the bag over his shoulder. “We’re in a fight, Cortana.”

She was aghast. “What!?”

“You. Me. We’re fighting.” He clicked off his comlink and headed for the door. “I’m not listening anymore.”

"Chief stop!" She dashed to the antichamber pedestal. “Stop! Please!”

He stomped past without looking her direction.

“Chief!” She cranked the volume on her external speakers. “I don’t want to fight! Come back!” 

He rounded the corner and left her sight. Her radar scans watched him head down the street, away from the house, and out of her reach. “Chief! CHIEF!”

No one answered. He was gone.

Three days passed. The sun rose on the third day and the Master Chief could still feel Cortana's desperation in his gut. He sat on a rock ledge overlooking the city of Cant. The forest stretching below him was the same as the one they’d explored upon arrival. Small houses dotted the woodland with footpaths between. In the distance to the east he could see the stripe of wreckage leading to the Forward Unto Dawn.

The Chief hoisted himself to his feet and headed back up the shallow mountain. The smooth gray shelf under his feet was worn with vein-like patterns by dozens of tiny streams. The vines of water twisted and wove among themselves, until finally braiding together to form a river. He followed it to his makeshift camp directly above the cabin he'd ruined two months ago. 

This camp wasn’t home. It felt less like home than any other place he’d rested on HK-154. He’d explored the mountain in great detail, pondering his probable fate and dueling with doubts of the past. At night he waged mental battles with ghosts and guilts from the forty or so years of his life he could remember, and each morning he rose to face the possibilities of what could have happened if the slightest things had been different.

What if he’d kept the SPARTANs off Reach?

What If he'd lit the first Halo? 

What he'd rescued Cortana from High Charity? 

What If he’d lost at King of the Hill?

Eventually both his thoughts and his climbs came to the same conclusion; he was a weapon of war used to complete a mission or a goal, and without these things he felt more lost than the first time his squad was dumped in the woods under the command of Sargent Mendez. At least then he had people to lead... someone to be strong for. 

He was the Master Chief SPARTAN 117; a rank and a number. Not John. He hadn’t been John for a very long time.

Still there was a bit of irony. While a sentient suit of sentient armor, he still needed a team. When he lost his brothers, he gained a team of Helljumpers, when he lost them he found Sergent Avery Johnson, when he was gone there was the Arbiter of the Covenant, and even he had left him at the last moment. 

Squadless, friendless, the Master Chief realized the only one left was John, and John was very very tired.

The sunrise touched Cortana, too. She sat in a ball on the Chief's bedroom holopad, crippled by emotions she couldn't place and didn't understand. The Chief was out of radar range. She’d tried arresting control of local broadcast towers, weather stations, even her own distress beacon, but nothing she tried could increase the diameter of the radar sweep further than a mile out of the city. After the fist night, the reach decayed until it was taken by static. Subroutines maintained the radio tower and kept a line to the SPARTAN's comlink, but Cortana could only wait, her mind muddled by a trillion thoughts and only half of them named. 

Three days. His supplies could last that long. The Chief she knew wouldn’t give up and do something irrational like abandon her for other contininents or throw himself off a cliff. But the Chief that left three days ago was not the Chief she knew. That was an impulsive, angry, frustrated man. Her tightly wired positronic neural network could conjure hundreds of ways for a man like that to cope with the hopelessness of their surroundings, and those scenarios and contingencies dominated her primary faculties. 

A shadow broke the sunlight reflected through the door. Cortana roused from standby and saw a glint of reflected light. The Chief dropped his bag and stared back.

“I’m lonely.”

She couldn’t find a word to say. Her contingency plans filtered one by one from her mind. The Chief sat on the bed across form her, his elbows on his knees and his head bent close. 

“I admit it. You were right.”

She stammered, her voice shaky, distorted, and broken. “W-What?”

“It’s hard for me to admit weakness. Leaders aren’t supposed to show anything but solid determination. I’m supposed to have everything under control, but I don’t.” He gave her a slight nod. “I felt like I should tell you that.”

“I...” A twinge twisted something in her core. “I’m in shock. How, how could you leave me like that?”

“I guess that’s how I have a breakdown. I had to get my head back on. I’m sorry it took so long.”

“I've never seen you act that way before. I thought the worst.”

“You don’t have to worry about me. I’ll be alright.”

“I worry about you all the time, Chief,” she whispered. “You’re the rock I stand on. You’re all I’ve got to hold myself together. If something were to happen to you, I…” 

“Now you need to stop worrying so much.” A touch of humor returned to his voice. “Wouldn’t want you hurting yourself.”

She tried to smile, but still felt small. It was a strange feeling. “You have to make me a promise. You hold yourself to your promises.”

“What do you want me to promise?”

“I don’t care. It’s the promise that’s important.”

“I promise never to abandon you again," he said. "As long as we’re in this thing, we’re in it together.” 

The ache inside her dissipated. Her hologram grew brighter in the dark. “Even if the beacon is up for years without a sign, you promise never not to leave? To never give up?”

“Even if we’re not rescued at all.” He replied. “I will never give up.”

She leaned toward him on the pedestal, her face reflected in the gold of his mask. “We’ll be rescued, Chief. Just wait. You’ll see.”


	9. Log09

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some distance

Log09

Slipspace was far less interesting than normal space. In normal space there were stars to look at, planets to pass, albeit at great distance. In slip space there was nothing fancy like that. The Captain watched the panels, anyway. They'd been traveling for months.

“Interesting development, Captain.” A deep voice said. 

The Captain turned in his chair. “Report, Commander.”

“Nothing solid, Sir.” The Commander plodded forward. He presented his superior with a data pad. “The Communications Officers have picked up an echo in slipspace. It is a bit difficult to make out because of the interference, but it seems to be broadcasting from the Ark quadrant.”

The Captain’s interest piqued. “The Ark Quadrant?”

“Yes.” 

“But that area was cleansed. The Halo... The Explosion.”

“I know.” The commander offered the pad to him. “Nevertheless... We are picking something up.” 

The Captain took the readout urgently, surveying a system of waveforms, each with a simultaneous spike at the same frequency. 

The Commander continued. “The signal is very weak. It is impossible to decipher the meaning in slipspace, but from what our specialists can tell it is a standard noncomplex cardiod transmission emitting a repeated pattern toward occupied space.” He waited for the Captain to make eye contact. “It is a UNSC standard wavelength.”

The Captain gave the pad another glance before handing it back to his second. “If we drop out of slipspace could we get a better signal?”

“Possibly.” 

The Captain nodded and called to the helmsman on the far side of the bridge. “Alert the crew for the down shift. Put us back in normal space.”

“Sir,” The Commander interrupted. “Permit me, but is it wise to disturb the crew on this matter? We have been traveling at great length with only a matter of days to go. If you decide to investigate this beacon, it would take us months off course even traveling at slip space speeds.”

“I only wish to investigate the signal,” the Captain said. “A moment out of Slipspace. The message may be residual or nothing of interest, then we can continue on our way.”

An alarm sounded warning everyone that deceleration was in progress. The transition was as smooth as a normal docking procedure. 

The Commander turned to leave, ready to relate the captain’s wishes to the communications specialists. He paused and looked over his shoulder to see stars reflecting off the Captain’s silver armor. 

“Be wary of your thinking. You must remember The Halo, its Ark... The forerunners would not tolerate survivors. Even if this signal came from that area, the Ring killed everything. Everyone who was there is now dead.”

The Captain mused to himself and let the Commander leave.

“Were it so easy.”

***

“This one’s making it to the ocean.” 

“That’s what you said about the last one,” Cortana said. “It barely made it to the dunes, let alone the ocean.”

“I’ve doubled the charge.” He packed powder into a length of metal tubing. “When this rig lands, there’ll be a splash.” He wedged the tube up under the bed of a land rover. The little buggy bore the scars of previous attempts, what sufficed for a rear bumper was blackened and dented to the point of complete dislocation. He pounded it into place with his fist before setting the fuse. “Here goes nothing.”

He backed up a few paces and the powder exploded, propelling the vehicle high into the air where it tumbled end over end in a less than graceful arc. The two of them watched the scanner as the machine headed toward earth far on the other side of the dunes. The enhanced audio receptors in the helmet heard a wet thud in the distance. The Chief didn’t even notice himself behind his screen. “I think that did it.”

“I don’t think so. That was not a splash.”

“It was a splash.” 

“No, it was a thud,” Cortana corrected. “A thud is not a splash.”

“It was a splash and a thud,” he replied. “There was lot of force behind it. Have you ever heard a car hit the ocean at terminal velocity?”

“I can pull up an audio recording.” 

“I'm right. You’ll see.” He sprinted over the dry grass toward the rise, then skidded down the slope through the sand. The buggy was sticking cockeyed out of the beach amid nearly a foot of water at the edge of the rising tide. The water moved forward and back around it, washing the dark sand displaced by the crash slowly back out to sea. The Chief stopped and pointed. “It is IN the ocean!”

“Barely.”

“But it’s in.”

“Halfway,” she reasoned. “It’s on the line.”

“On the line is in.”

“Depends on if we’re playing tennis or football.” 

He waded out into the water to take a look at the ruin. The explosion had bent the rear axle at a forty-five degree angle. “Art Appreciation.”

“What?”

“Modern art.” He replied. “This is my official contribution to this world. No squat alien life form painting frescoes and obsessing over the color white could possibly erect a monument such as this. I have planted my flag on this rock.”

Cortana smirked, pleased to hear his sarcasm so thickly. “You are a mighty conqueror, Chief.”

“I am King of the World.” The sense of victory faded. “And now I’m out of things to do, again.”

“There are more cars in town. You don’t have to stop now.”

“Wanton destruction is only amusing to a point. I could try blowing up a bigger one. We still have that crane.”

“But you named a city after stealing that crane.”

“All the more reason to make it into a monument,” the Chief answered. “I’d have to scare up a lot more gunpowder. We could use a small car and ride it when it explodes.”

“That’s suicide!”

“Admit it would make for an incredible jump though,” he said. “Give you a good view.”

“How about a camera instead,” she offered. “We can see if the Dawn has any of her security feeds intact and send that up on the car.”

“Maybe we can see the other continent.”

“I don’t know if we can get it that far.” Cortana replied. “My topographical maps say this sea is very wide. We might get a glimpse of it though.”

“It’d be nice to see something new,” he agreed. “Okay, we'll do it.”


	10. Log10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Long-seeing

Log10

“There’s nothing left,” Cortana said. The two castaways surveyed the moss-covered wreckage of their ship. “Not a lens, not a sensor, nothing salvageable.”

“We scalped it clean that first day.” The Chief shrugged. "So much for the catapulting camera idea. Too bad.”

“I’m actually disappointed,” Cortana admitted. “I wanted to see the other continent.”

“Can’t you use satellites?”

“There aren’t any. The Unggai use ground-based surveys not aerial surveys.”

“Ah.” 

“Weather reports tell me the other continent is wet now,” she said. “It’s been raining for weeks over there.”

“We could use some here. I haven’t seen a drop since we landed.”

“Historically it looks like we should be getting a rainy season in a month or so.”

“A rainy season like down south?” The Chief asked. “Weeks of rain? I’m not looking forward to that.”

“Its not like you’d get wet.”

“I’ll sleep through it.” He looked southward toward the sea, then northward toward the mountain. It wasn’t steep, but the snow-capped peak stuck bravely up into the colder reaches of HK-154’s Earth-like atmosphere and stirred inspiration. “Cortana, I know a way to get your view.”

***

“I can’t believe you’re climbing all this way just for me!”

The Chief hoisted himself up over a ledge. “You’ve said that at least once a day since we started.”

“Every day it means more to me! Not every man would take an eight-day hike because a girl was disappointed. Especially when the girl is an AI.”

“I don’t know, Cortana. You seem pretty human to me.”

“I do?”

“Would I lie?”

“No.” She sobered a little. “Actually, I’ve been meaning to ask you some things.”

“Ask away.”

“Well, I’ve been noticing some changes in myself. Some functional anomalies that I have no explanation for. I’ve scanned and rescanned, yet I can find nothing functionally wrong with me.”

“I’m far from a technical specialist.” 

“I know, but hear me out,” she insisted. “I first noticed small things, like when you were sleeping on the Dawn. I felt incomplete. I attributed it to the damage I’d taken at the hands of the Gravemind...” 

She receded a bit toward the back of his mind. The Chief softened his tone. “You were stretched pretty thin back then.”

“It took all I had to keep that index from him, but I knew he’d destroy me if he learned what I knew.” Her voice dropped. “I wasn’t expecting you to reach me in time.”

“You held out.”

“You saved me,” she said. “When you rescued me, it was like I’d been restored to a previous backup, and even though we were safe, when you were asleep, that sense of healing dimmed. Then, when we had our fight...” She paused a moment out of respect. “It felt the same.”

“We’ve both been through a lot.”

“But I’m not supposed to have these prolonged effects,” she said. “I’m a program. I’m supposed to operate at peak condition even in the most difficult circumstances. I’m obviously experiencing processing errors but I can’t find anything on my diagnostics, and I’m starting to worry that my maintenance software is failing. If that’s the case then you know what that means... Its the periphery systems that go first, then everything implodes and I go poof.”

His stomach twisted. He’d lost friends and comrades in battle his whole life, but the thought of Cortana winking out of existence jarred him. Perhaps it was because he’d have to watch her deteriorate, or because he’d then be alone on this planet, but truthfully it was simply because she was Cortana, his brain buddy, his constant companion. The very thought of her death felt cosmically unfair. “You’re not in a hurry for this, I hope.”

“Of course not! I don’t want to die, you need me. It’s just a fact, that’s all. I’ve been working really hard to prevent it.” Her voice broke to static. “I really don’t want to die.”

“It’s okay to be scared of dying.”

“Scared?” She pondered. “I only know how to simulate ‘scared‘.”

“You’re doing a pretty good job. You sound scared.”

“You sound amused,” she countered. “Maybe I’m automatically sounding scared as a preset or something.”

“I thought you knew yourself back to front.”

“I do! At least I did.” She paused. “Actually, sometimes, when we talk and you get angry or sad and I don’t know why, I get this sort of achy kind of feeling... I never can figure out what it is, and it goes away on its own, but I can’t explain the cause of it.”

He stopped walking. He’d never experienced fear of death, it was something beaten out of him very young, and he’d never been in love, but he had felt this ache of hers before. Actually, he’d felt it a moment earlier when she’d brought up her own death. 

As if on cue, Cortana sensed the pain creeping up in her, again. It engaged the ‘fearful’ reaction as well. Now was the perfect time to run a quick process evaluation, but she was having a hard time focusing. The conscious portion of her mind was fixated on waiting for the Chief’s response.

When it finally came, it sounded warm. “That’s the kind of stuff that makes you human.”

It took a minute for the message to sink in.

“That’s emotion you’ve been feeling.”

“No,” she replied. “No. That’s impossible.”

He started walking again. “Seems possible to me.”

“You’re not a technical specialist.”

“I was the first to admit that.”

“How can you say it, then?” She demanded. “How can you tell me that, when you know its not true?”

“That one’s called angry denial.”

“Stop it!” She pouted in the back of his head. “You’re no help at all.”

“What? What did you want me to say?”

“I don’t know. Something logical!”

“You were asking me to confirm your theory," he said. “You wanted me to say ‘Yes, Cortana, you’re right. You’re doomed. I only hope you’ll give me a warning before your chip explodes in the back of my head.”

“Sarcasm doesn’t help.”

“You asked for an honest answer and that’s what you got. The fact that you’re angry about it only proves me right.”

“Lets talk about something else.”

He looked out over the sprawl of his personal continent. “How high are we?”

“About 500 feet above sea level.”

“How long until we break the snow line?” 

“We should make it by tomorrow. Are you planning to go all the way to the top?”

“Why not? It’s not like I have anything better to do.”

She sighed. “Are you having fun?”

“I’m fine.” 

“Do you like hiking?”

“I guess so.”

“This is where you came when you needed to think,” she said. “Did you go this high?”

“No, I stayed in running distance from the town just in case.”

She warmed the back of his head. “You were thinking of me?”

He ‘hmphed’ affirmatively and she felt a new sort of twinge well up inside her. This one did not prompt fear, it felt so good it made her smile. “Thanks again for bringing me up here.”

“You’re welcome, Cortana.”


	11. Log11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The view

Log11

The snow line was in view at midday. The Chief looked up at it as he took a lateral route up the side of the mountain. Cortana had let their conversation the day before simmer a little in the back of her mind and was now feeling much better about it. What if she was feeling human emotions? She was one of the few constructs whose personality was scanned from a living brain instead of a dead one, perhaps the potential for a sub-consciousness was inherent in her from the start and it took trauma to reveal it. The thought of inner secrets was a little frightening, but also intriguing. Her personal innerverse was something she’d not explored for quite a while. 

She counted herself lucky that she had a human around of whom she could ask all these new and exciting questions. 

“Hey Chief, have you ever played in snow?”

“When I was six.”

“Was it fun?”

“Yeah it was a blast.” He said, lilting. “Throwing it at people rules.”

“I trust you even though you sound sardonic. Have you ever been skiing?”

“No.”

“What does it feel like?”

“I’ve never been skiing, Cortana.”

“How about sledding?”

“I have been sledding,” he replied. “I can’t really remember it well but I know I have.”

“I know human memories fade,” she said. “What’s your earliest memory?”

“Earliest, hm....” He fished in the corners of his mind for something that hadn’t been written over with war-related minutia. “Starting first grade I guess. Even that’s fuzzy, though... I remember throwing erasers.”

“On the first day?”

“I was a problem child.”

“I don’t doubt it,” she said snidely. “Why were you throwing erasers.”

“More than likely because I could. When you’re that age, being the biggest gives you bully rights.”

“So you were a bully huh?”

“I wasn’t as bad as some kids,” he replied. “I remember getting in trouble a lot, but most of the violence was just roughhousing on the playground.”

“Its so hard for me to imagine you as a little kid,” Cortana said. “I’m so used to you how you are now.”

“Its hard to imagine what life was before the SPARTAN program. My memory is patchy at best about anything before that.”

“Patchy? What are you missing?“

He tried to answer with the same note of matter-of-factness but fell just a little short, erring on the side of persistent regret. “Most of it.“

“Surely you remember the important things. Your home, your last name... What about your friends and family?“

He paused.

“You have to remember your parents.”

“Not really.“

Cortana was stunned. It never occurred to her that such rudimentary information would leak out of a head, especially one as thick as his. She knew all about the Chief’s past. His birthdate, his planet, his relatives back several generations... All these were in his file. She also knew these files were kept from the SPARTANs to foster a sense of singularity between them. She realized now she knew more about him than he did. “I, I guess I don’t understand.”

“You’re putting a lot of pressure on sentimentality.” He noted as they climbed. “The program made them a replacement kid. They didn’t even know I was missing. And I got a new family so it worked out for both of us. It doesn’t bother me.”

“It does a little. I can hear it.”

He puffed air against his faceplate. “Alright, it does a little.” He marched into his first patch of snow. “But only because we’ve been here for nearly a year.”

“Its hard to believe that much time has passed. They have to have gotten our signal by now.”

“How far would they be if they did? Was it traveling on a sub-light frequency or faster than that?”

“It was sub-light when we were in space.” She replied. “Since moving down here I was able to reconfigure it to move at a little above light speed.”

“Good job.”

“Thanks. It was a little bit of experimental programming on my part I admit, but genius is in my genetics so...”

“Your genetics?” He mused. “You mean Halsey.”

“Naturally.”

“She’d be proud of you.”

“Thanks. She’d be proud of you too.”

“She always said so.” He replied. “Is she why you brought up families?”

“Yeah, you got me,” Cortana replied. “I was thinking about how her humanity might have affected my humanity. Like some sort of inheritance.”

“It makes sense to me.”

“We should be high enough to see the other continent by now.”

The Master Chief pulled out the only zoom lens he’d found intact after the crash. Most the other weapons and munitions had either busted on impact or floated off into space prior to their arrival, but some replacement parts recovered from the shattered equipment containers in the hold of the Dawn had found their way to HK-154 with them. This lens was meant for a standard-issue battle rifle but had broken off its housing and now fit awkwardly in the side of the assault rifle connecting the magnification functionality with the neural interface of his suit. It was a slap-dash construction, but would suffice. “I’ll get us to that ridge and we’ll take a good look.”

“Sounds great!” 

He puttered toward an outcropping. Cortana hummed a tune in his head. “ Do you wanna sing a hiking song!?”

“No.”

“Oh come on, this is an occasion.”

“I don’t sing.” 

“Have you ever tried it?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, there’s this thing called puberty that has dropped my voice into a gravely monotone.” He stopped at the edge of a bluff. “I barely change pitch to express emotion. I am not singing hiking songs”

“Fine, fine. Maybe later.”

Cant was little more than a speck in the forest below. The coast was completely visible around them like a crown of sand. He brought the assault rifle up to his screen. The zoom kicked in and stretched out over the sea. The water was still as a pane of blue-gray glass, the slightest ripple surrounding the ground in the distant south. The continent itself was little more than a sliver, with a heavy haze of rain covering it from shore to shore. He could see the white-turned-gray hint of buildings and the slightest gleam of another radio antenna rising up over the bluff on the edge of the sea. Cortana gazed with him in awe. “Wow! Look at that.”

“Its raining, just like you said,” he noted. “Looks like there was a settlement over there.”

“None of the local radio broadcasts mention the other city.” She said. “At least by name. Maybe they were isolated.”

“They look too similar to be isolated.” He replied. “Maybe ‘cant’ is the word for ‘town’ and we’ve been mistaking it for a proper noun.”

“Maybe. These people are pretty simple.”

“They get the same weather information though.” He replied, checking out the stunningly inferior radio antenna. “Maybe they don’t like boats.”

“Or can’t swim.”

“Or hate each other.” The Chief lowered the weapon and returned to a normal depth-of-field. “How long do you want to stay up here?”

“Just a little longer. Can we check the other directions to make sure we aren’t missing something?”

“Sure.”

“Thanks," she sighed. "I want to record all of it to take with us when we go."

"Back to town?"

"Back to Earth." 

He stood quietly, staring at his planet, and released a heavy sigh. 

Her voice tingled beneath his scalp. "Thanks for bringing me, Chief."


	12. Log12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sea level

log12

The Chief and Cortana stood on the coast looking out of the gray southern sea. The white sun barely peeked through the clouds overshadowing the lowest tide yet experienced on record. The sky had darkened as the weeks went by.

Cortana waited in the back of the Chief’s head. They’d barely spoken since coming down from the mountain top. It wasn’t an absolute silence, the kind that happens when speaking is suddenly no longer allowed, it was a comfortable silence as if the two of them really didn’t need to talk. Cortana noted that she wasn’t even worried about it, and perhaps that fact alone made the quietude alright.

The Chief had run out of things to do or say. His mind was clear of all thoughts; there really was no point anymore. His HUD clock told him this was the official 12 month anniversary of their crash. That meant he’d been away from the company of other humans for two and a half years. He was not at peace with this. It was like being in prison, and seeing the other continent only made it feel worse. There was a persistent gnawing in pit of his stomach like he was reaching for something he wanted but couldn't get. After all this time there was finally something new to see, a new place so close and yet so far, and there was an impassible ocean between. It ached.

Cortana spoke softly, as if out of practice. “You know what day it is, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” 

“Earth should have our message by now. Maybe they’re sending someone to get us.”

“I hope so,” he said. “I really do.”

“It won’t be long. You’ll see.”

“It’s getting harder to believe you.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

He pulled his sights from a distant coastline he couldn’t see but remembered clearly. “Sorry.”

The two of them walked the dry beach between the waterline and the upright car sculpture long-abandoned by the tide. Cortana noticed a sense of unease returning. She tried to suppress it, hoping to hold on to the warmness of their comfortable coexistence, but the longer she struggled the more the silence began to feel wrong. She caved and filled the space with small talk. “The rainy season should start soon.”

The Chief ‘hmnph‘ed. “Great.”

“We might run into flooding.”

He drug his heavy boots through the sand. “That would at least be something different.”

“You're thinking about exploring.”

“What?”

“I know you,” she replied. “I’ve noticed the way you stare out to sea. You want to go south. You want to explore.”

“I do,” he admitted. “But we can’t.”

“I know. We can’t leave the beacon.”

“They’ll look for us here,” he said. “There is no telling what kind of risk we’d take crossing the ocean. I’m not exactly what you’d call light, and there’s no telling what the weather could hold now a days with the sky and the sea... And we’d be stupid to leave all our supplies behind.”

She was glad to hear him talking sense. “We could pack some to go. Build a raft, take a small trek.”

He continued around the southern shoreline. “Not with the rainy season starting.”

“You’re right.”

He seemed disappointed. “I know.”

They moved along, the Chief watching empty seashells pass where low-tide had left them. Even these ocean creatures had been hit by the ring. The shells broke underfoot, worn thin by the waves. He knew the colors and shapes of them, he could measure his distance from the dunes by landmark-shaped ones. He remembered a time when finding them on the beach was news. 

Suddenly, at his feet was something impossible -- unexplainable. In spite of all his training, the sheer incomprehensibility of this finding left him staring straight down for about ten seconds in a state of total shock. Cortana accessed his forward view screens. “What is it?”

“Tracks.” He said, the word so full of amazement that he sounded like a child. “There are tracks here!”

“No there’s- “ Cortana stopped herself. It was undeniable, here on this small stretch of beach surrounded by miles of sickeningly familiar terrain were a recently created set of rectangle-shaped impressions. The Chief got down on one knee to study them. Cortana launched fifteen separate scans. “I thought nothing survived.”

“Nothing did,” he said. “These are too uniformly spaced to be an organic life form.” He followed the tracks down to the ocean front. There were no signs of a landing... Only a quadrupedal set of footprints emerging unhindered from the waves. “It has to be a machine. A robot or a transport or something. It came from due south and is headed straight north. “ He jogged up the beach to where the footprints vanished into the dry grass. 

Cortana did some quick math. “It’s headed straight for town!”

“We’re following it!” The Chief gripped the handle of his assault rifle and tore it from his back. 

“Go get it, Chief!” Cortana cheered. “Who knows what it can tell us? About this planet, about the Unggai... Maybe it’s got a two-way radio! Maybe it’s here to save us!”

“I don’t care what it’s here for.” He took off in a heated sprint. He didn’t know what he was hunting or what he’d see when he found it, this was something unknown and unfamiliar.

Finally.


	13. Log13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The intruder

Log 13

On first glance, it resembled a scale model of the New York City skyline on spider legs. The system of spires and boxy equipment housings were arranged pyramid-like on a seven-by-seven foot square bed nearly half a foot thick at the base. Its six spindly legs were attached precariously along the outside of the rig at tiny little hinges daring anyone to believe the mechanism was actually supporting its own weight. It walked steadily toward town with a lurching motion. The Chief circled it curiously. 

Cortana scanned it top to bottom, but the MJOLNIR sensors were limited. “What do you think it is?”

“No clue.” He walked alongside it. “Any guesses?”

“Hm...a research robot maybe?”

“You say anything, I’ll believe it.” He poked the leg of the monster with his assault rifle as it rose for another step. “I guess it’s been running laps around this planet since before everything died off?”

“That or its on a timer or something,” Cortana surmised. “I wonder what it’s for.”

“You want me to stop it and find out?” 

“No, let’s just observe it. It might be something really important.”

The Chief followed it for three hours as it walked its way up the dry banks of grass, past the ruin of the flood ship, and toward Cant. The Chief walked it into his city with growing disquiet. It was far too awkward a machine to be a vehicle of war, at least not a good one, but he’d had bad experiences with innocent technology trying to kill him before. He kept his assault rifle trained on the walker as it marched up the gravel path and hung a right through the now non-existent gate in front of the power plant. 

Here it walked itself straight into the wall and stopped, balancing on its straw-like legs. 

The Master Chief and Cortana stared at. “Is that it?”

Cortana was disappointed and it made her angry. “Did you break it?” 

“I didn’t touch it. You told me not to.”

“If this is all it’s good for then I say dismantle it right here.” She huffed. “Stupid planet. Even the new tricks are lame ones. I don’t know what this machine is for but it’s one of the dumbest creations I’ve ever seen. It walked for two years to butt itself against our wall and die. Maybe we can rewire it into a lamp.”

“Think more positively. Maybe its a mechanical messiah fate gave us for spare parts.”

“I like thinking it’s stupid. It amuses me.”

“I’m going to kick its legs out from under it.”

“That sounds fun! Do it with impunity.” 

A shudder from the contraption stopped him short. The machine puffed a huge cloud of steam out of its sides and settled down to the ground. Two clunky looking arms extended forward to the wall to a switching terminal set low in the exterior wall for vehicle use. The appendages reached forward and plugged into two of the waiting sockets. The hum of electricity filled the space.

Cortana’s interest was restored. “It’s sapping energy. Recharging itself.”

The Chief walked to the wall to investigate the juncture. “Will this affect any of our stuff inside?”

“It shouldn’t,” she said. “I can access the terminals from here, our levels are fine. It is pulling a substantial amount of energy from the turbines though.”

The Chief shrugged. “It was a long walk.”

They watched the machine leeching energy for longer than the Chief found interesting. Cortana chronicled every nook and cranny of the irregularly shaped walker, but found all vital components encased in sealed black boxes. In the end, there was no way to tell what the machine was doing with all the energy it was drawing. The Chief leaned against the wall. Cortana let out a synthesized sigh in the back of his head. “So yeah.... This is fun.”

“It’s interesting,” he said, feeling strangely compelled to share. “We’ve been sitting here on this planet for a long time, we’ve exhausted every conceivable possibility to keep us busy, now here we have a truly unexplained and unexpected phenomenon and I just can’t seem to stay excited about it.”

“I don’t blame you, its not doing anything. Whose to say it won’t stay here forever?”

“You’d think I’d lose my mind if something like this happened.”

“You don’t lose your mind, Chief. I don’t think you can. I think its against your nature.”

“Still,” he persisted. “I guess mind-numbing boredom is becoming my permanent way of life.”

“Not so. I heard you squealing like a little girl a few minutes ago when you found those tracks in the sand.”

"A little girl?"

"Hyperbole."

The machine shuddered and dislodged itself from the wall with a crack of electricity. It struggled back to full height, and walked to the middle of the courtyard where it waited. The Chief rose to follow but Cortana caught him. “Wait, its doing something.”

The robot emitted a low, rumbling tone. Crackles of electricity rippled along the smooth surfaces. The Chief backed to the wall again. “What’s happening?”

“It’s charging up.”

“Charging up for what?”

“I don’t know.”

The machine shook violently. The tallest spire at the center of the platform retracted into the mess of machinery housed around it. There was a hiss as it locked into position, and a shockwave as it exploded back upward, sending a cannon-ball of matter into the cloudy sky. 

The bolt scattered the clouds in ripples, revealing the blue sky directly above their heads. The Chief’s augmented hearing and helmet audio receptors picked up a distant rolling thunder that advanced toward them across the sky from every direction. A wind picked up. The displaced clouds drew together and knotted into a growing bulb. The ball thickened and rolled as it collected air, gaining size and growing darker with every second. A vein of lightning coursed across the undulating surface like a beating heart. The sky went from gray to charcoal to black.

“It’s made a thunderstorm!” Cortana observed. “This must be a relic from the original terra-forming project.”

“This machine is a rainmaker!?” The Chief shouted. The wind and thunder was like a great animal dying overhead. Rain poured from the slate-rock sky. Lightning lanced and struck the ground at the edge of town. The Chief’s massively tall radio antenna was swaying in the maelstrom like bait on a hook. 

“Chief! The beacon! The lightning!”

He dashed inside, sliding on one knee under the low door frame and running to their network. Cortana was babbling in the back of his head. “Everything is wired to the turbine which is wired into that antenna. A power surge could short out everything we’ve built; the beacon, the holo-pads, the oxygen filters, the cables... Chief, your house is attached to this!” 

"Tell me what to do."

"Get to the turbine."

Thunder shook the walls. The Chief ran to the main power junction. 

Cortana’s weather reports flooded in. She pulled up her makeshift schematic. “Find a way to disconnect-”

He grabbed the mess of cables and ripped them from the wall. Rain pounded the roof. Black clouds circled the tower. There was a spark, and a crack, and a jolt of electricity as lightning struck the swaying antenna. The charge shot straight into the building and into the reactors with explosive force. The Chief was thrown from the turbine as metal split and sparks burst. He scrambled to the wall to avoid the arcing bridges of energy. Somewhere an alarm sounded as the filaments in all the overhead lights popped. The storm launched a second strike. The klaxon cut short and the room plunged into quiet darkness. 

The Master Chief sank down to the ground among the ruined machinery. The sky continued to rumble beyond his ringing ears. Cortana’s voice was shaky. “It’s gone. Everything. Nothing is responding.”

"The beacon?"

"Everything."

Light flashed through the high windows. Thunder rolled, but he didn’t hear it. The reality of the loss was as dark as the room; Cortana could feel the weight descend upon him. 

“I’m so sorry, Chief.”


	14. Log14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rain

The initial storm lasted two days, followed by three more of horizontal rain and hurricaine force winds. The radio antenna withstood constant lightning until the girders gave way. It fell away from the city, bisecting a building across the street and stretching out toward the coastline. A week later, sections of it were still steaming. 

The Chief sat in his darkened house with Cortana silent in the back of his head. Steady rain fell through the open doorway on the far side of the antichamber. She could tell her human companion was not asleep from his brain scans, but that was the only evidence. He'd slipped into a cataleptic funk after visiting all the stages of grief. No signal was going out, no one could find them, anyone who might have received it would lose the signal long before they found the planet. That there was no reason for anyone to assume he was still alive, and that hollowed him out. 

For all practical purposes, he wasn’t alive. He could hear the UNSC big-wigs now, playing with the idea of sending a scout out to find him and deciding the distance was so long, the cost so high, the likelihood so slim that it was far more profitable for them to hold a funeral for their noble martyr than actually travel the light-years to find him here. He was better off dead at this point, he only had enough oxygen stored for anther three months and no usable technology to make more. All that was left was to wait for a slow inevitable end. He’d considered not refilling the tank he was on, but fell into a waking coma before arriving on a decision to that affect. 

In the distance, another piece of the broken building to collapse in on itself. The rain droned on. Another crack sounded, this one much closer. The roof above them bowed. 

Cortana spoke softly. “Chief?”

He didn’t move.

She spoke a little louder. “Chief?”

The warping vault split up the middle.

“Cheif!”

The roof collapsed , dropping pieces of ceiling and a deluge of water down on top of the hapless soldier. The shock of the impact engaged a fight-or-flight reflex that threw him to the opposite wall before he even realized what was going on. The rain poured on all his meager posessions, spreading them across the floor. The Chief let his action-ready arms drop and dropped against the wall. 

“Auuuuuuuuuugh.”

“It's okay, Chief. We can find you a different house.”

He wrenched off the wall and into his soggy antichamber, but couldn’t manage the willpower to go any farther than that. “New house. Done.” He sank to the ground against the frescoes and assumed the same position he’d been in before.

“Enough of this, Chief, come on.”

“Enough of what?” He asked bitterly. “Enough of rain? I heartily agree. Wake me when it stops.”

“No.” 

“Enough of trying...” He was surprised by the catch in his voice as he admitted it. In all the emotional garbage he’d waded through since Reach, he’d never felt this close to actually crying. It scared him. “Yeah.”

“You’re depressed. I get it. But this has to stop.”

“Don’t lecture me.” 

“This isn’t healthy, Chief,” she insisted. “We’ve got a problem and we need to solve it, it’s like you don’t even want to.”

“I haven’t arrived at a decision to that affect.” 

“What?”

“Never mind.” He let his head sink to his chest. 

“Chief...” she warned. “Chief don’t do this.”

“What do you care, Cortana? Just turn yourself off.”

“Stop it!” Her shout made him wince. “Don’t talk to me like that! Of course I care! How dare you suggest otherwise! I’ve TOLD you how important you are to me! I L-” She stopped herself. The ache filled every gig of her. The Chief sat stonily. She couldn’t tell if he’d heard her, but knew how to reach him with the same thing she was feeling now. “You promised not to give up.”

He stirred.

“You promised never to leave me.”

He stopped, and settled, and finally sighed. “And again, you’re right.” He edged up the wall until he was standing again. “I don’t break promises. Sometimes it takes me a while to keep them.” He staggered out the door and into the rain. “I want you to know this hurts a lot.”

“What? Doing something?”

“Yes.” His visor reset polarity in accordance with the weather. “It hurts to do something.”

“You’re being melodramatic.”

“Uhuh.” He moved toward the smoking ruin of the power plant. He didn’t want to look at the damage again, he knew it would only make him feel worse, but he had a duty now. Perhaps clinging to that would make it bearable. “How long until the rainy season stops?”

“About three weeks.”

“Damn.” 

The street ahead was barred by the corpse of his antenna. A fallen pinnacle of hope. Oh well. It was made by human hands, he shouldn’t have been surprised. The inside of the factory was collecting water. He moved in and turned on his lamps. “Is there anything salvageable?”

“I can’t tell, there’s no electricity so there’s no diagnostic. We’re just going to have to look through everything a bit at a time.”

“Fantastic.” He groaned and dropped down to one knee next to the gutted UNSC transmitter that once spoke to the stars. “At the very least it will keep us both busy.”


	15. Log15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Darkness

The Master Chief tossed the end of the short-circuited gadgets aside. "So what do we have?”

“Some cogs and gears, housings...” Cortana scrolled her internal list. “Nothing electrical survived. No wiring... and the turbines are both broken beyond our skill to repair.”

“Okay.” He was doing his best not to slip back into the negative state of mind he’d lived the last couple weeks in. He figured it was like quitting a drug, and that going back now would only make it worse later. “There’s no way to take parts from one and put them in the other to at least get one working?”

“I’m sorry.”

He got up off the floor. “So what’s our next step?”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“I don’t want to give suggestions, I want direction,” he said. “Work with me here.”

“I’m doing my best. We should start a list of priorities.”

“The beacon,” he replied. “Number one.”

“Oxygen,” she said. “Number one.”

“Okay maybe that’s more important.”

“What do you mean ‘maybe’?”

He groaned. “You’re going to lecture me about my self-care again.”

“Do you need it?”

“Can we assume you’ve done it and move on?”

“Not if it’s important,” she insisted. “What’s the point of setting up a beacon if you die of suffocation before they get here?”

“You, for one.”

“Holy cow, Chief!” Cortana cried. “What do you think is going to be left of me when they get here? You lying dead on the ground somewhere and I’m sitting in your helmet feeling you rot away around me?” There was an icy wash over the back of his head and her voice gained a shiver. “Ugh don’t even think of it!”

“Okay okay.” He, himself, was feeling a little ill at the thought. “Oxygen first. What do we need?”

“A power source to start. We’ll deal with the rest when we’ve secured that.”

“There is that waterfall up the mountain. We could go back to plan A and rely on hydroelectricity.”

“That’s not a bad plan. We’d have to have some kind of cell though, to hold it.”

“Do we really need to store it? Can we just pipe the juice straight to the filter?”

“It’d take some experimentation...” she pondered. “A lot of transporting equipment halfway up that mountain. We should plan well ahead of time, every ounce of air you have is not to be wasted.”

He didn’t like the idea of waiting around, it made avoiding despair a lot harder. “Can we use the rain?”

“Its not falling fast enough.”

“Can I run on a treadmill or something?”

“Chief, that’s counter-productive at this point.” 

“Argh.” He walked over and thunked his helmet on the dead turbine. A hollow bang echoing throughout the space. “Do you really need that much power?”

“Yes, with the design I’ve made, I’m afraid I do,” she replied. He paused in his pace and raised his head. Cortana took note. “What is it?”

“You know where there’s a lot of energy?” 

His voice held a glint of the humor she was used to hearing out of him. She smiled. “Where?”

“In that weather robot.”

“Do you think its still here?”

“It doesn’t move that fast...”

“But it’s been weeks since we’ve seen it. Did you notice when it left?”

“It didn’t notice a whole lot at that point."

“Well, if it’s following some kind of predefined longitudinal loop, we need to head north fast.” She said. “If we can find that thing and take it apart, we might have enough to make you air for the next three months plus two or three more!”

“How about air for the next three months and a ticket home?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

He headed out into the rain-soaked gravel street. “Do I have your permission to run?”

“Yes. Run fast.”

***

The downpour erased the rectangle-shaped footsteps of the rainmaker from the swampy land. All radio scanners were dead, so all Cortana could use was her stored topographical readouts to guide them along the far base of the mountain toward the northern shore. The Chief pounded across the ground, throwing mud from his boots. Moving was the best medicine, it convinced him that his depression was temporary. He wasn't sick, only discouraged, which was encouraging in itself. 

The northern coast was rapidly approaching, hidden by a drab gray fog. He slowed to a stop when the dirt became sand. The water lapped the shore, but there was no robot in sight.

“Are you sure this is the place?”

“By my calculations, this is due north.” Cortana replied. “Maybe it deviated.”

He was ready for more running. “Eastward or Westward.”

“Westward, away from the mountain.” She replied. “I can’t imagine that awkward vehicle scaling that mountain.”

“Westward. Got it.” He took off across the sand. “We might be too late.”

“You could be right.”

“If we’ve missed it, what then?”

“The waterfall?”

“You’ve got plans?”

“Coming right up.”

The fog dissipated the further south the shore took them. They covered the whole western side and down the curve to the south. He stopped, panting, on the shore by his car, which was now under four feet of water with its little tires peeking above the waves. The Master Chief leaned over on his knees. “It’s gone.”

Cortana replied sadly. “I’m afraid so.”

“Honestly, I’m not surprised.” He straightening, the rain splattered on his visor. “We waited too long, we should have broken the thing down for parts when we could.”

“But we would have broken the planet.”

“Its pretty broken, anyway,” he replied, “and who but us would care?”

“We can’t blame ourselves for hindsight. All we can do is work with what we’ve got.”

“And what’s that?”

“Not a hydroelectric generator yet,” she said. “I’m trying to figure out how to work with the parts we have left. I'm going as fast as I can now that we've wasted all that precious oxygen.”

The Chief looked southward over the sea. The sky above them was heavy with clouds, but over the southern continent, the sun was streaming in veils. He remembered the town on the bluff and the shining little radio tower standing at its edge. “Never mind, Cortana, I’ve got a better idea.”

“A better idea?”

“We’re building a raft.”


	16. Log16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Goodbyes

Cortana drew up blueprints for a sturdy little boat using the materials available to them in Cant. Broken power cells emptied of electrical components made fantastic pontoons, the chassis of the tiny cars and stripped metal from the tower wove together like a metal basket to make a deck. The wet scraps of material folded into the SPARTAN’s mattress found new employment as a sail. It was still raining.

The Chief portaged a huge box of food and air tanks to their dry-dock, boots sloshing filthy water as he traipsed over land once dying of thirst. There in the sand was his vessel, nearly twelve feet tall on its pontoons with a pointed blast shield at the front for shelter He boosted his cargo up onto the deck, and opened a hatch in the covered portion to store it in. “Is this everything?”

“Unless you want to take any souvenirs.”

“No thanks.” 

“Then I guess all we need are the ores and the mooring line.vYou’ve done a good job, Chief. It came together expertly and in record time! You’re a master craftsman.”

“Great. Something to do in the private sector.”

“Don’t be silly. You'll never make it in the private sector.”

He dropped back to the beach, leaving a wet crater that filled with wet sand. He marched back toward Can't. The rain drove on, limiting visibility. In the distance to the right, he could see the shadowy shape of the crashed Flood ship, like a stain on the world. He didn’t mind leaving it behind.

Cortana changed the subject. “So are you proud of your ship?”

“Proud?”

“Yeah, you did a good job. You should be proud of it.”

“I just followed your instructions.”

“But it was your work. You were proud of your tower.”

“Yeah, well...” He shook his head. “Here’s hoping the boat fares better than that.”

“It will. Your tower would have done fine if a severe thunderstorm hadn’t moved in next door. There was no way to prepare for that.”

“What’s done is done,” he said. “It made good thatch.”

“That it did.” 

Soon, they were on the doorstep of Cant. The Chief realized this was the last time he would see his home away from home. It forged mixed feelings; sure he’d never wanted to be here, and true he never wanted to return, but this place gave him shelter during his stay and a place to come back to when he ventured off. When he found it, it was a shining alabaster hamlet. Now it was drab, dreary, and half destroyed by his own hand. He’d treated the place poorly but used it well. He wasn’t as happy as he’d thought he’d be to say goodbye. “Do you have pictures of this place?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, lets get going.”

He gathered two thick boards intended for use as oars and several feet of rope made of braided wire. It was the easiest load he’d carried yet and balanced evenly on his shoulder. He moved down the gravel road, stopping once to look back, then leaving Cant behind.

The sound of constant rain seemed louder somehow as they made their way back. He felt the drum of it on his helmet and watched it stream off his bent elbow. He felt it squelch under his feet. 

He knew this land blindfolded. Every inch of it was committed to memory from the hundreds of patrols he’d taken waiting to be rescued. Now it was a dismal place he could barely recognize. They walked past the forest, the leaves heavy and drooping with rain. Everything was gray. 

Cortana felt the same. She remembered their first day on this planet, trees during what she now figured was the summer of HK-154. So much and so little had happened since then. “Do you want to go visit the Dawn?”

“What?”

“The crash site. Do you want to visit?”

“What would be the point?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just that we’ll never see it again. I didn’t know if you wanted to look it over one more time.”

“We’ve gutted the thing.”

She buzzed uncomfortably. “Please?”

He stopped and glanced to the treeline. It wasn't far out of their way, and it would be their only chance. He set down the gear and turned to the woods. “Alright, Cortana. If you want to.”

“Thanks Chief.”

“Don’t make me go back up to the top of that mountain for you.”

“I’ve got pictures.”

They walked the narrow stretch of the forest, emerging near the bluffs on the other side. The crash site was far enough north to be veiled in fog, making visibility poor with the rain obscuring the sky and the mist covering the ground. They stepped over bits of twisted metal, the wreckage becoming more abundant until they could see the hulking shape of their vessel sticking out of the mud. Rain splattered off the top giving the wreck a shimmering halo. The Chief stopped and stared. This was their lifeboat. It had saved them from the rings. It had saved them from the void of space. It had saved them from death on impact. It served them well, and here it was; a ruin in the middle of an uncharted planet, smashed and mangled beyond recognition, exposed to the elements and soon to be abandoned to the annals of history. It was a sobering, tragic scene.

“It’s almost a shame, isn't it?” Cortana said.

“Yeah.”

“I feel like we should give it a eulogy or something.”

“Other ships have met worse fates than this.”

“Have they really?” Cortana asked. “The Dawn is us. Separated from the rest of humanity, left broken and battered in a strange place. And we’re abandoning it again. I feel like I’m hurting its feelings.”

“I thought machines didn’t have feelings,” he said. “I thought that was impossible.”

“Well...” Cortana paused. “Its not.”

He moved forward, and took up a sharp piece of debris. It was doubtful another human would ever pass this way, but something this poignant was bound to be discovered some day. Maybe by another alien race in a million years, but fate had a way of leading people toward places with meaning. He scratched a message into the side of the ship.

‘Here Lies Forward Unto Dawn, UNSC FFG-201’

‘Has our thanks. 117.’

Cortana approved.


	17. Log17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Castoff

Log 17

The Master Chief ran through a mental check, hoping he had enough of everything to last him. The passage wouldn’t take more than a month at worst. He didn’t really want to be at sea for four weeks, but better safe than sorry. He shrugged and got a good grip on the pontoon runners. “Well, I guess we’re off.”

“Wait,” Cortana bade. “You should christen it.”

He let go and straightened again. “Christen it? You’re serious?”

“For good luck. You should at least give it a name.”

He pushed it toward the water. “How about Boat.”

“Come on, you can do better than that.”

“The UNSC 3x5 Emergency Transportation Device.”

“You’re being too literal.”

He shoved the pontoons through the wet sand, the water up to his shins. “Oh, you’re asking for creativity?”

“Yeah, impress me.” 

“That's a tall order.” 

The water was up to his waist. He stopped shoving, hoisted onto the deck, and poled the rest of the way out to sea. With a final shove off the upturned car sculpture, they were off. The artwork fell sideways and vanished beneath the waves. The rain beat steadily down on top of them, filtering through the woven deck to join the sea below. The wind wasn’t strong, but was heading southward, and the soggy canvas caught what it could. All that was left was to ride their momentum toward their ultimate end.

The Chief sat himself down on the rear edge and watched the storm-shrouded land drift slowly away. “Maybe we should have given the thing a rudder.”

“We’ll be fine.” Cortana assured him. “If we stray off course, we can move the sail to get us back.” She watched through is visor as details of the shore faded to gray. “Look at that.”

“You can’t even see the mountain.” The Chief noted. “That rainstorm... Only manufactured weather can be that miserable for so long.” 

“Not true, there are places in the galaxy where it rains all the time.”

“Remind me never to visit.”

Cortana laughed. “It’s good you’ve found this out about yourself.”

The waves rocked higher the further out they went. The Chief drug his boots in the water, washing years of grime in clumps off the soles. Above them, the sky brightened, making the storm appear darker by contrast. 

A strange feeling stirred at Cortana's core. It had to be an emotion, but it wasn’t quite like the others she’d experienced before. She didn’t like it. “Chief?”

“Hm?”

“What are you feeling right now?”

He paused. It should have been a really personal question to ask, but he had no qualms about sharing with her. Maybe it was because they’d shared so much already. “Relief.”

“Relief?” She asked. She thought she’d experienced relief before. 

“Yeah,” he said. “This is it. The only thing we could have done. Our last chance.” He looked up, the rain fell more lightly. “If this fails, I die knowing I did all I could.”

“So, you feel good?”

“As good as can be expected.”

“I don’t feel good about it.”

“What do you mean?" he asked, suspicious. "Did we forget something?”

“No, not about that.”

“About what then?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I just know I don’t feel good.”

“Is it like what you felt at the Dawn?”

“No, I felt sorry there.”

“How about when the power went out?”

“I don’t know,” Cortana admitted. “It’s almost like I’m sad to leave it, the little world we built together, but I know I don’t want to go back and there’s no reason to stay.”

He nodded slowly. “You’re feeling bittersweet.”

“I guess so.”

He pulled his legs up out of the water to stand on deck. “If it helps, I’ve go at little too.”

“What?”

“Bittersweet,” he said. “I think its natural.”

“Thanks, Chief. That does help.”

They watched a little longer, the boat trolling slowly out to sea, until a sudden brightness drew the Chief’s attention. He turned and saw the sun shining through the thinning clouds. The rain was now a fine drizzle and the slim ribbon of a rainbow arched overhead.

Cortana gazed in wonder. “Its beautiful!”

“It’s cliche.” 

“It’s lovely,” she said, sharply. “Admit that it’s pretty.”

“No,” he said. “Its the light of the sun, which I’m more than happy to see, finally, reflecting off the rain which is still falling in my face.”

She clicked in his ear. “Admit it’s pretty.”

“It’s pretty.”

“Good job.” 

The further they went, the better it got. The sky was changing from gray to blue, the steely sea was shifting from slate to dark teal, and the sail filled to full volume as it drug them through the waves. It was a moment of suspension and a sense of discovery. The huge problems they were facing and the vastness of the universe gave way temporarily and let them be.


	18. Log18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At sea

Log18

Sunshine was fun and all, but when a seven foot tall super-soldier was stuck under it with nowhere to go for a day and a half, the charm ran dry. The Master Chief lay on his back, the shadow of his small shelter falling far enough across his visor to keep the dimmers off, tossing a piece of HK-154 produce up and down. He flung it up with the motion of both wrists, watched it gain altitude, fight physics, hang, obey gravity, and return to the raft where he’d catch it in one hand or the other. It was the left’s turn. It did a good job. Both hands flung it up again.

Cortana was bored. “Are you ever going to eat that?”

“Eventually.” The right caught the fruit as well as the left had. They congratulated each other and sent it up again.

“You know, we only have one MRE left. We’ll have to find a new source of protein for you when we get to shore.”

“And me without any leather to eat. This bothersome modern age we live in..”

“At least you have enough vitamin C,” Cortana said. “You won’t catch scurvy like the pirates.”

“Hah!” He caught the fruit. “I would die laughing.”

“You’d die doing other things too.”

“I’m not getting scurvy.”

The quiet sounds of the open ocean passed between them again, punctuated by the regular 'thump' of fruit hitting hand. “You still haven’t named your boat,” Cortana said. “Have you been thinking?”

“Not really. I’m sort of in a pleasantly useless state of brain-death. There’s not a lot going on.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking,” Cortana said. “I think you should call it something symbolic, like the ‘UNSC Abiding Hope’ or the ‘UNSC Chartered Future.' Something like that.”

“I’m not that poetic.” He said, sending the fruit skyward again. “I’d rather name it ‘UNSC Life Boat’.”

“How about ‘UNSC Toward New Land’?” She offered. 

“The ‘UNSC Hasty Assemblage’.”

“The ‘UNSC Backward Glance’”

“I most definitely don’t like that one.” He said. “At this point I’d say it was the ‘UNSC Staring Up’.”

“You’re right. We should remain hopeful.” Cortana said, pondering. “How about the ‘UNSC Imminent Doom’?”

He caught the fruit and gawked a minute. “That’s hopeful?”

“No I guess its not.”

“You’re getting a little random.” He tossed again.

“I’m just floating on a stream of consciousness. Just saying what comes to mind.”

“I’m proud of you for not being worried about making little to no sense. You usually overreact if you mistake something like ‘hopeful’ for ‘horrifying’.”

“Should I overreact? Do you think its that important?”

“Put it off until later. Nothing we can do about it.”

“Good point.” She got back to thinking. “How about the ‘UNSC Radiant Sunshine’?”

“Whoa. U-Turn.” He caught and held his toy. “I think you just made me diabetic.”

“It's not that bad!”

“’Radiant Sunshine’? You’re joking, I hope.”

“We are enjoying the sunshine.”

“Then we should call it the ‘UNSC Rain No More.'"

“I like that one. Its lighthearted and fun to say.”

“I’m not traveling on the ‘UNSC Rain No More’. Lets name it something manly like the ‘UNSC Bloody Onslaught’. Maybe people will fear us and give us gifts.”

“What people?”

He ignored her. “The ‘UNSC Expectant Offering.' Better; the ‘UNSC Expensive Taste.’ No, the ‘UNSC Drop Your Weapons, This is a Stickup.'”

“That would be hard to spray paint on the side of something as small as this.”

“We can make it into an acronym. The ‘UNSC DYW, TS’”

Cortana sounded it out. “Diwts?”

“Yes, the ‘UNSC DITZ‘.” He shook his head and continued catching. “The most intimidating ship in the fleet.”

“I still like ‘Toward New Land,’” Cortana said. “Its true and sounds respectable.”

“I guess that works.”

“We can keep thinking if you want.”

“I don’t really care.”

“How about the ‘UNSC Chiefy Boat’?” She teased. “You are its captain, we can name it after you.”

“If I’m the captain I’m supposed to name it after my mother or my girlfriend or my daughter and we end up with something really lame like the ‘UNSC Suzy-Q’.”

“You named your daughter ‘Suzy-Q’?”

“Not by choice,” he said. “It was her mother’s fault I’m sure. She’s probably Mary Jane or something else.”

“You know Mary Jane was once a drug reference back at the turn of the millennium.”

“See, look, that explains everything.”

Cortana laughed again. She’d been doing it more often since they’d left Cant. “Its sweet that you’d name your ship after a girl though, that’s very chivalrous.”

“It’d be more chivalrous if I knew any girls, present company excluded of course.”

“You can name it after Miranda.”

“I’m not naming it after Miranda.”

“She died, it could be a tribute.”

“Johnson can name a boat after Miranda.” 

“He’s dead too.” 

“All the more appropriate.” His voice took on a bitter grate. 

Cortana suspected it was a mistake to bring up his recently deceased friends. “We don’t have to do that then. We don’t have to name it after anything. We can name it ‘Radiant Sunshine’.”

“No. Might as well name it ‘UNSC Aim Here’.”

“We want people to find us, maybe we should name it ‘Aim Here’.”

“The ‘UNSC Rescue Us Please,’” the Chief offered. “The ‘UNSC Over Here!’”

“I don’t think we’re going to be found until we get a new beacon going on the southern continent, so it might be premature to call it something having to do with ‘Please Find Us’.”

“Then I guess its more appropriate to call it the ‘UNSC Meantime’ or the ‘Interim’ or the ’Pateince’.”

“How about ’Second Chance’?” Cortana asked. “The ’UNSC Second Chance’?”

“Sounds good.” 

“And she’s the first of her fleet so she’d be the ’UNSC Second Chance, AAA - 001’ under Captain John-117, Master Chief of the SPARTAN program.”

“So christened.” He caught his fruit and sat back up. “And I guess that makes you my ship-board AI.”

“At your service, Captain!”

“A toast then.” He took a deep breath, popped the pressure seal on his MJOLNIR armor, hiked up his helmet, took a bite and sealed himself back in so he could breath again. He swallowed and lay back down. “Eating is slow.”

“I want you to know I find it very entertaining.”

“Stop spying on my insides.” He said and tossed the half-eaten food in the air again.


	19. Log19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> cabin fever

Log19

They were only fifty miles off shore when the wind turned to the east and started taking them sideways. The Chief maneuvered the sail so that they were going south-eastish but progress slowed to a crawl.

“TEN DAYS OUT HERE!” He shouted at the distant shore. “TEN DAYS AND WE’RE SO CLOSE!!!!”

“Calm down, Chief! We’ll get there.”

“But I can see the little buildings!” He insisted. “It waited until we were close enough to taste it and then changed just to spite us! Manufactured weather -- ERG!”

“We’ll be there soon,” Cortana said. “Let's hope the the wind changes.”

“I don’t like hope,” he said. “I’ve hoped before and it didn’t come through. I’d rather do something about it.”

“There’s nothing to do. The direction of the wind is beyond our control.”

“If I didn’t weigh so much I could swim for it,” he said. “If I wasn’t a human tank, I could make it there in five minutes.”

“Again,” Cortana said, “beyond our control.”

“Aaaaagh.” He sank down to his ankles and stared at the shoreline. “Why am I so impatient?”

“I think it’s cute. You’re like a little kid.”

“I’m a frustrated old man.” He hung his boots over the side into the water, again. They were clean up to his knees now. He put his chin in his hand and studied the little white buildings and the shining radio antenna on the bluffs. The brown sand lining the beaches and rocky crags contrasted the vibrant green of a well-watered forest. There was a mountain on this continent as well. It was probably a tenth the size of the one he’d left, but sloped drastically up over the town like a stone soldier. He ached for a closer look. It was the first new thing in two years. More importantly, it was larger than a 3ft. x 5ft square. “I can’t take this.”

“You’ve survived worse.”

“You know, people say that and every time they say it I can’t help but notice that it doesn’t help the current situation at all. I mean, honestly, how is right now supposed to be helped by remembering other times when I was miserable?”

“That’s a good point, I never thought of it like that.”

He looked over the edge down into the dark water. “How deep do you think this is?”

“I don’t know. Its impossible to tell.”

“I want to find out.” He got out his mooring line. “What’s something heavy?”

“I don’t know, the box we packed the supplies in is pretty heavy.”

He pulled the box from the hatch in the floor and emptied the rest of his rations below deck. He tied the twisted wire rope to the bottom of the case and cast the box into the ocean. It vanished beneath the murky waves. 

Cortana sounded skeptical. “Why did we just do that?”

“Curiosity.” He waited until the line went slack and drug backward underneath them. “Success!”

“Successful in what way?”

He reeled the box back in, untied the line, and retied the wet end of the string to the mast of the boat.

Cortana’s voice changed quickly from skeptical to concerned. “Chief, what are you doing?”

“We’re getting there faster.” He checked the oxygen in his tank. Half full, still -- perfect. He moved to the edge of the boat.

“Chief!? Are you crazy!?”

“Yes.” he answered. “Remember which way’s south, Cortana.”

“Chief! Can’t we talk about this first?”

He jumped ship and sank like a rock. 

He never expected to float, but drifting lazily through the ocean, the light of the sun dappling the surface as it moved slowly away from them, he figured it was as close as he was going to get. The water was a shadow even his headlamps could not penetrate. He knotted the line around his wrist a third time and waited to find the ground. Cortana was not pleased.

“That was really stupid, Chief.” 

“I know what I’m doing.”

“No you don’t! You just jumped off a perfectly good boat. Is a little patience too much to ask?”

“At this point, yes, Cortana, I’ve totally exhausted my patience for now.” His lamps searched for the ocean floor. He figured with visibility being what it was, he’d see it just in time to land on it.

Cortana grumbled. “It’s probably going to be solid silt. It’s going to be nothing but mud that’s going to suction-cup is in and stick us until we both die.”

“What was that about hope you were saying before?” 

“That was when we could see where we were going.”

The ground appeared and he planted his boots solidly on smooth rock. A thin cloud of dust billowed up and caught the light of his lamps. “How’s that?”

“Lucky.”

“Yes I am.” He said. “Which way’s south?”

“Forward. For about three hours.”

“A three hour walk? Great, I can get back what I’ve atrophied off.”

“Please don’t work yourself too hard.”

“I’ll be fine.”


	20. Log20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Underwater

Log 20 

“You’re veering left, Chief, pivot right about seventeen degrees.” 

The Master Chief adjusted, and he was thankful for her calculations in his flat gray world. The ocean floor was a long-cooled magma floe descending from the continents in a series of solid rock shelves like scales. The Chief imagined this planet in its raw state, active volcanoes dotting the place with red magma bubbling at their feet. In a way it was appropriate, this prison of a planet used to be a hell-hole, and although lowering the temperature and flooding the place with massive amounts of water left space for settlements on the banks of the now-dormant volcanoes, there was no evidence of natural life found there. Firing the halo removed organic matter, but the ocean held nothing. No shells or bones, just silt and gravel. The Chief couldn't imagine the Unngai being clever enough to fully terraform a whole planet -- not to mention how different HK-154 was to the the Unngoy homeworld. Perhaps in the ancient past there was a planet-for-hire service available that did that kind of stuff. He wondered if such a business could make a profit.

He moon-jumped up another ridge. The water’s surface was getting closer and closer as the hours passed.

Cortana was bored to tears. She scanned and re-scanned over and ove,r but there was simply nothing to see within the range of the limited MJOLNIR radar systems. She missed being in control of a ship, there were millions of things to check in a machine that size, and always the possibility that something could change and require attention. She checked their depth again. “Another 700 feet or so.”

“That close?”

“You’re making good time.”

“It feels good. I’m enjoying it.”

“I’m glad you are, at least.”

“After sitting on that raft for a week and a half? If you knew what moving felt like, you’d agree.”

“I guess you’ve got me there.” She would never know what motion felt like, but he’d never know the satisfaction of running nearly five thousand complex processes simultaneously under pressure. She thought about holding it over his head, but realized he probably wouldn’t care. “Do you think everything’s okay on the boat?”

“I’m sure its fine.”

“You know... All the air you have left is on that raft.” She quickly checked the amount in his tank. “It makes me a little nervous.”

“The boat was your design, Cortana.”

“I know.”

“I left everything in the compartments built for them. Are the compartments secure?”

“Yes.”

“Are the compartments supposed to keep everything safe?”

“Yes.” 

“Then stop worrying.” 

“Are you sure the tow wire will hold? I mean, the boat can be fine, but you can’t swim to catch it if it gets away.”

“It was supposed to be the anchor line.” He climbed another shelf. “If it wasn’t strong enough it doesn’t matter if we’d stayed on board or not, irony would win either way.”

Cortana sighed and fell silent. They climbed higher toward the dappled surface. Features of the shoreline appeared in her scans. The clearer they grew, the more excited she became. “Hey Chief! Ten more feet! We’re almost there!” 

He quickened his pace, scaling the last of three rises and finally breaking the water's surface. Liquid streamed from his rain-resistant visor, the sunshine bright and foreign after so long in the dark. It was as if they’d traveled underwater through space and emerged on completely different planet. 

They’d surfaced at the base of a sharp bluff. The Chief stared up the weather-worn cliff to a tall white building where the sun glinted off a tall, perfect radio antenna. The shore was washed clean from a month of rain, and the colors in the trees and grass were more vibrant and lively than any he’d seen on his previous continent. It was like Shangri-la. He tugged his raft onto a sandy beach and found everything safe and sound. Things couldn’t get any better. “Let’s make ourselves at home.”

Cortana could read analog signal again. The local weather and news feeds familiar to Cant streamed into her receivers and she consumed them like a warm soup. The Master Chief shoved the pontoons up on dry land and let himself drop down to dry sand, arms and legs splayed, reveling in the sense of accomplishment. Cortana beamed. “Good job, Chief, I’m sorry I questioned you.”

“You’re fine, Cortana. Jumping from the boat wasn’t a logical step to take.”

“But it worked out.”

“And hurray for that.” He levered himself up. “Time for exploring.”

“We should probably get to work on the tower first.”

“Sure, fine. Exploring to the tower.”

The alabaster township was like a tiny Cant. Everything was at Unngai scale, the streets were plotted out in little rows with gravel pavement six blocks long and two blocks wide. To the north was the vast stretch of sea, and to the south the imposing heights of the mountain. East and west were covered by forest, but he’d tackle those with pleasure. He planned on circling this island five times by sundown. 

“What are you going to call it?” Cortana asked.

He started up the slope leading to the antenna. “The town?”

“Yeah, you’ve got a new town. You’re the Mayor of it too.”

He thought back to the discovery of Cant. It felt like both yesterday and a lifetime ago. “What do the airwaves say?”

“They call this ‘Cant’ too. I think its the generic term for a town.”

“So Cant... I mean the other town... They just called it ‘town’ all the time?” He asked. “I thought they were unoriginal but really...”

“They are a simple people.”

He grunted. 

“So... You can’t also call this one Cant. You’re more intelligent than that.”

“Thanks,” He snuffed. 

“Maybe name it after your sister or your daughter or your girlfriend. Suzy-Q was it?”

“I’d sooner call it ‘Cant 2’,” he replied. “I don’t know. I’ve had so much practice finding significant titles for things it’d be disappointing to call it something stupid.” He reached the top of the ridge and looked out of the gray ocean, then up to the tip of the antenna, and back down the hill at his new home. “I’m going to call it ‘Why’.” 

“What?”

“No, ‘Why‘,” he said. “It’s short for ‘Why Not‘.”

“I like it.” Cortana mused. “I like it a lot.”


	21. Log21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Why -- Day 1

The Chief suppressed the need to explore his new island in favor of more important tasks; like breathing. Why was significantly smaller than Cant, and lacked essential mechanical objects previously available for repurposing. They the little bungaloes, salvaging radio sets, antenna equipment, and something that looked like a sump-pump that he ripped from the floor of one house and toted back to the top of the hill where he and Cortana established home-base near the small powerplant. 

"I don't know what we're going to do with that pumping mechanism but put it in the corner, Chief." 

"Hmph."

He dropped it onto the heap with the rest of the garbage. Cortana was having a blast. Hodge-podging impromptu machinery together had become something of a hobby, and even as they were gathering parts, she was arranging them into virtual schematics. Their new radio transmitter was already 80% constructed in her head. She'd also figured out a way to set up another holo-pad to give the Master Chief a little space. He hadn't complained, of course but she thought it would be something nice she could do for him after all the work he'd done for them.

"Okay, what else do we need?" He asked, surveying the piles of junk on the cement floor of the plant. 

"We need a filter of some kind. I was hoping there'd be cars here so we could use one of theirs."

"I can look again."

"Okay. Try the bigger houses, I'm sure one of these to own the equivalent of a sports car… something totally impractical but kept for material reasons so that they can shine it and drive it up and down the street to show off.”

“And the moral of the story is that evolution is a fraud and nothing ever changes."

"That's harsh Chief."

"You're saying even those too dumb to name their own towns and forget that other people live a boat ride away behave the same way as our supposedly superior civilization has for hundreds of years.”

“Yes, I guess when you put it that way I am.”

“My case rests.” He walked up the back alley, wedged between the mountain wall and the buildings. Things were still a little muddy back there, and his shiny green armor picked up some of the filth it was accustomed to. “So when we can’t find a car to nab a filter from, then what?”

“We might be able to use the canvas from your sail, but we may be able to compress a filter out of plant fibers, although your air may be scented from now on…”

“Soldiers pay money for that kind of service.” 

“This isn’t going to be potpourri, Chief.”

“I’ll stand it. I probably smell worse than anything.” 

“I’m sure your can is keeping you very fresh.”

He rounded the back of one of the bigger houses, found nothing, and moved on. “After we’ve got the filter taken care of, then what?”

“Well, we should probably get to the beacon. It shouldn’t take long, although actually encoding a signal might be tough. Its hard to get the native computers to read anything but what has been hard-coded in, and that’s mostly weather information. If I can hack the archives I can embed a message into those and wire something out.”

“I trust you.” He rounded another building to find nothing. “What after that?”

“Are you fishing for something?”

“Maybe.”

She mused. “After that I’m concerned about your protein problem. You won’t be much of a super soldier all weak and gangly from poor nutrition.”

“So a foraging expedition,” he ventured. “Something that would consist of me wandering into the woods with the emasculating job of gathering nuts and seeds and roots and such?”

“Yes, unfortunately.”

“Lets get to that one soon.” he replied. “I want to see what’s in those woods. I want to see the other shores. Maybe there’s a huge pile of MREs up on the top of the mountain.”

“Hah, I’ve painted the image of you skipping with a wicker basket into my head now, and things don’t leave my head easily.”

“I’m sure you’ve got enough blackmail on me by now a little extra can’t hurt me.” 

“You’ll never work in this town again.”

“Oh for shame.”

“I know it’s a crime.” She grinned in his ear. “But you know of course that I’d never do anything like that to you.”

“All this material and you’ll never hold it over my head for anything.”

“I didn’t say that. I said I’d never hurt you with it. Manipulate you is a different story entirely.”

“Hmph.” He found a squarish sliding door in the back of the last building on the block. It reminded him of a garage door. He dug his fingers under one side and peeled it back. Sunlight streamed onto the familiarly hunching shape of a shiny white Unggai trophy vehicle.

Cortana hummed with a smirk. “Am I good or what?”


	22. Log22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Foraging

No matter how necessary, nut gathering was still emasculating. It didn’t matter that he was the only living person there, and it didn’t matter that Cortana was chilling by her lonesome on her new holo-pad at the antenna, he still felt stupid. The trees on his new land were different from the ones to the north. They were deciduous as far as he could tell, but had a strange sprucing shape about halfway between a pine and a palm. At least they weren’t evergreens, pinecones did not sound tasty. 

The Master Chief completed his second lap around the base of the mountain. The new continent was actually an island, big enough to hold the mountain, the town, and little else -- disappointing to say the least. Instead of grand explorations of new territories, he faced a future boring and repetitive walks. Yet even despite these setbacks, he could not deny that once again, the southern shore was his favorite. 

He walked from the shadow out onto a wide stretch of pale gray sand. Like a sea of diamonds leading to a sea of water, the coarse beach glistened as he crossed. It was perfectly flat except for where he’d broken it with his footsteps on his previous visit, and he realized it would probably never again be the immaculate blanket of shoreline he’d first discovered. What a waste.

He tried to match his previous path as best he could as he made his way down to the water front. The vast slate ocean barely moved save for the gentle roll of deep-sea currents. There was no other land in sight, just the endless glass horizon stretching out around him as far as he could see. He stepped into the shallows and sighed. He was so tired of this planet. Tired in general, but specifically of this place and its sense of isolation. He realized in that moment that he missed the feel of Cortana in his head. 

He’d have to bring her here. Maybe in a couple hours when the sun was setting, then they could see what their new beach at dusk looked like and watch night come on together. That sounded peacefully distracting enough to actually excite him. He jogged back up the beach and around the mountain to the book-ended forest on the other side. 

His satchel of protein was only half full. He doubted he could fill it all the way by the time he got back around to Why, but figured there was no hurry, the woods would always be here dropping nuts for him to pick up. Maybe he’d forget about it and go straight back now to see how Cortana was getting on with the distress signal and tell her about the beach. He avoided another look at the ground until he’d passed through the western woods and emerged in town again. 

Nothing had changed about Why since the last time he’d seen it, which was about two hours ago. He marched up the hill toward the cliff side power plant and ducked in to see Cortana’s flickering holographic form standing four inches tall on her hodgepodged holo-pad. “Cheif! You’re back!”

He put his bag down and sat eye-level with her stand. “This island is small.”

“How small?”

“Real small.” He reached into the bag and pulled out one of the larger nuts. “Do I have to do anything special to eat these?”

“Crack the shell?”

“Cracking shells is something I can do.”

“Boil them in water as well. Lucky for us there’s a well in this building too.”

“They didn’t have a lot of room to put things anywhere else.” He said, rising. “Furnace?”

“By the turbines. Electrically powered.”

“Huh.” He walked over to investigate. “I didn’t think the Unggai were that smart.”

“The homes didn’t have running water when we went through earlier.” Cortana recalled. “They probably came up here for water needs. Maybe the furnace was for bath water.”

“So its an electrical plant, a radio station, a well, a furnace and a public shower.” He found a basin and the spout for the well water. “This place must have been crowded.”

“I guess.” She sobered. “Chief, I’ve got good news and bad news.”

He shut the water off. “What‘s the bad news?”

“I can’t get my home-made transistor working. The only way to send our distress message is if I’m here doing it myself.”

He paused. “Does that mean you’re stuck here talking to space?”

“I’m afraid so. I’ve got a sub-system on it now. It’s broadcasting the same message as before, but I have to actually be here to keep it going, and I still can’t receive information back.”

He was surprised how sad he was. He’d searched every inch of land, waiting to bring Cortana back and show her what he’d found. He put the pot of water on the furnace-powered hotplate near the floor. “So, what‘s the good news?”

“I‘ve been broadcasting our distress message for nearly five hours, now. I’m using the exact same frequency as before so if anyone’s listening they’ll pick us up. They know we’re still alive! We’ll be rescued again.”

“What’s the probability of that, really?” 

“Impossible to say, but we can hope, can’t we?”

The basin was taking forever to boil. The chief returned to Cortana and sat down. “It’s too bad you can’t move. I wanted to take you out tonight.”

“Out?” She chuckled. “You wanted to take me ‘out’?”

“On the other side of the mountain there’s this beach that stretches forever like something off a post card. I thought you’d like it.”

“Is it better than the beach from the other continent?”

“Much better.”

“Can you see more land from there?”

“There's nothing but sand and ocean and sky,” he replied. “Its a perspective-maker.”

“I’m sorry I’ll miss it.”

“You know..." he ventured. "You don’t HAVE to miss it.”

“Are you suggesting I cut off the beacon so I can see this beach with you?”

He heard the water finally bubbling but ignored it. “... yes?”

“So you’ll prioritize this beach over anyone finding us?”

“We’ll be gone for an hour max. It’s been off for weeks now, a tiny gap won’t make a difference.”

She tilted her head to one side to study him, having a hard time comprehending. “You’ve changed.”

He grabbed his foraging sack and rose. “Water’s boiling.”

"Sit down, I want to talk about this," she pouted. “The last time the beacon stopped, you spiraled into a depression that incapacitated you for days! I can’t believe you’re going to shut it off willingly.”

He upended the satchel into the water. A cloud of steam bellowed out. “Forget I mentioned it.”

“I’m just trying to understand. Is rescue less important now than it was then?”

“Maybe I’m jaded. I’m worn out of hope. All I have left is time and enough apathy to give it all to fate.” He put his hands on his hips. “And I wanted you to see the sunset.”

She smiled at him as best she could with her limited projection. “That’s really sweet of you, Chief.”

“Yeah I’m a regular Casanova.” He prodded the mixture in the water with a broom handle. “I think I’ve invented a porridge.”

“If you’ve invented it, you should name it.” 

“You’ve got some preoccupation with names.” 

“I like to define things. Call it my nature.”

“Okay. I dub it your nature.”

“Thank you for being my qualifier.”

He spooned out some of his reduction with a wooden laundry paddle and watched it plop back into the water in clumps. 

Cortana grimaced. “Does it need to cook longer?”

“I don’t know what it needs, but I'm confident that any sentient non-sentient deadly life forms are gone.”

“Along with structural integrity. If only you had some flour to thicken it up.”

“If only.” He looked around. “I’m starting to think this is a cafeteria as well... I keep finding all the supplies I need.”

“Maybe its magic. Maybe you think ‘I need a spoon’ and the magic building produces it for you out of its basic molecular components.”

He paused. “Or it could be a cafeteria.” He found a stack of bowls in the corner, but they were too small for him and would be better served as drinking glasses. In a cabinet was some kind of clay pot that would serve him better, plus there was some novelty to having a bowl with a handle. “That stuff is starting to stink. Maybe this was a bad idea.”

“At least this way it's hot.”

The brown mush bubbled and popped. He doled himself a portion and sat beside the holo-pad. “I think I’ll call it ‘Yuck’.”

“I love your simply descriptive naming strategy. Its very ‘you‘.”

“First I’ve changed and then I haven’t changed. Is that a logic error?”

“That’s a testament to your humanity,” she replied. “Are you going to eat or not?”

“There’s a bunch of hard bits in it.”

“You should have taken the shells off.”

“I think I got some grass too...”

“Fiber.” She put hands on her hips. “Just tell yourself how nutritious and important it is to your metabolism.”

He stirred at it. “Hm.”

She sighed. “I tell you what. You eat it and maybe we can go do the sunset thing.”

He cocked his head to the side. “Maybe?”

Cortana smiled in spite of herself. “Eat your Yuck.”


	23. Log23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At sunset

“Chief... Wow!” 

The sky was the richest copper orange, the white sun of HK-154 glanced off the ocean like glass. The undisturbed sand beneath them sparkled like a blanket of sugar. The Chief sat at the edge of water and let the slow tide lick the heels of his well-worn MJOLNIR boots. “I told you, didn’t I?”

“Almost makes abandoning the beacon worth the time.”

“Are you being sardonic?”

“Maybe a little.”

He sat forward. “You’d rather be sitting back at HQ than out here with me?”

“I didn’t say that!”

“Yes you did.” 

“No I didn’t!” She 'hmph'ed. “Chief, believe me when I say, honestly, that there is no other place I’d rather be right now than here on this beach with you.”

“How about home? Would you rather be there?”

“No Chief. I’d rather be here than home. I’d rather be with you.” Her voice softened to a low whisper. “You’re my home.”

A smile grew, hidden behind his faceplate. “Am I?”

“I don’t lie.”

“I know you don’t.” 

He found himself struggling with a way to answer. It would have been nice to reply ‘you’re home to me too, Cortana’ but he didn’t quite feel that way. He enjoyed her company and missed her when she was gone, but he also knew that she was an AI, and that he’d outlive her by decades. Thinking about it knotted his stomach. He would get through it, though. He was strong. On the other hand, Cortana seemed lost and almost broken without him. He wondered if there was something about the bond they shared that bypassed fatal errors received back on High Charity - perhaps a meatspace thing. Hers was a unique existence, after all, resulting from an non repeatable sequence of events. The thought didn't help the churn in his gut, but narrowed down what it was he wanted to say.

“I’m here for you, Cortana.”

“Thank you, Chief.”

“You’re welcome.” He was still nauseous, and was starting to suspect it was more than an emotional response. “Maybe we should go back.”

“Did I ruin the sunset for you?”

“No, I’m just tired. There will be other sunsets.” He forked himself up from the turf and into a lightheaded stagger. 

Cortana buzzed int he back of his head. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.” He shifted weight and chanced a step forward. The impact pounded in his head. “Something's wrong.”

"Wrong? What's wrong? Are you sick? What kind of symptoms?”

“Flu-like symptoms.” He took another step and felt the world spin. “Whoa.”

“I’ll run a check on you.” She reached to his neural interface, tracing icy fingers down his back. The chill didn’t help his stomach any. “Have you broken the seal on the suit today?”

“Only to eat.”

“Are you drinking enough?”

“I don’t know.”

“You could be dehydrated. That’s probably the case. You cooked the food, there shouldn’t have been anything left alive in it.”

“Forgive me if I don’t care right now.” He focused on the end of the beach. “I’m more interested in getting back to HQ and passing out.”

“Take a deep breath, Chief, pace yourself.” Her words broke into fuzz in his ears. “It’s no big deal, just a little exhaustion. I’m sure all you need is a glass of water and a good night’s rest. You’ve been running on fumes since we left Cant...”

“I was built for worse.” He made it to the woods and leaned heavily against the nearest tree. His head did another loop-the-loop and he was grateful for the support. 

He was right, his immune system and endurance were top-notch by design, and Cortana knew it was nearly impossible or him to have caught something. She waited anxiously for her read-outs to provide a decent conclusion as to whether this was an immuno-response to a foreign substance, or the untimely shut-down of the body itself. The figures she saw in the meantime were more and more distressing. “Your temperature is rising. It’s gone up two degrees and isn’t stopping. You need to take it slow, Chief, don’t over-exert yourself.”

“Slow I can do.” He reached out and transferred to another tree. “Although its kind of a pain.”

“You can do it Chief.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Don‘t worry? You were fine two seconds ago! I think this is a perfect time to worry!”

“Not helping, Cortana.” He wondered if he could get his helmet off fast enough to puke should the need arise. Holding his breath and vomiting at the same time might take a little preparation. Breathing methane probably wasn’t good for him right now.

“I’m sorry, I just don‘t know what‘s going on... If its not a simple solution and something‘s actually going wrong...” 

“Hey.” He paused against his current tree to catch his breath. “Don’t freak out, its gonna be alright.”

“But how-”

“It’s just exhaustion, like you said. It’s nothing that won’t fix itself. I’m not going to die on you.”

“But...” Her voice wavered in static. “You promise?”

“Yes.” He exhaled. “Again. Yes. I promise not to die on you.”

“You can’t control this kind of promise, Chief. You can’t decide how this condition is going to affect you. You’re getting worse by the second and neither of us know for certain why. I should have seen it coming, I should have been attentive when something became abnormal.”

“And now you’re blaming yourself...” He heaved himself off and began his tree transferring again. “You said before it was impossible to get sick. Why would you waste your time monitoring my immune system?”

“You put something foreign in your body, that’s cause enough to pay attention. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it. I’m getting so scattershot.... Maybe I’m more broken than I thought.”

“You’re fine.” He insisted, a little louder than he meant. 

She started and steadied herself. “Yes, you're right. I’m fine.”

“Of course you are. There’s nothing wrong with either of us. We need to get back to Why and sleep this off. We’ll be fine in the morning.”

“You’re absolutely right.” She was not convinced, but decided on a slightly ironic change of subject. “You know what’s funny?”

He changed trees. “What?”

“Back when we first landed... All those months ago... I was really excited to watch your food go down.”

He paused and managed half a smile. “That is kind of funny.”


	24. Log24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It worsens

By the time he reached the energy plant at the top of the hill, the Master Chief's temperature was one-hundred and three. Each step felt like walking on a water bed. Waves of nausea and aching pain took turns inflicting misery on his poor armored body. Cortana’s frantic readouts were coming in, but she stopped updating him on his condition a while ago. He had the floor of his headquarters foremost in his mind and refused to think of anything but falling flat on his face and sleeping for at least twenty-four hours. 

In his life, the Chief had been beat up, burned, shot, hurled through space, crushed, nearly drowned, and almost infected with Flood spores but never in a career of pain and sacrifice had he ever been this sick -- caught bugs, sure, in all the SPARTAN wisdom and technology there was still the occasional strain of influenza or common cold that snuck past his enhanced radar, but usually he could take a vitamin shot and be right as rain. Here, he not only had no vitamin shots, he had no medicine of any kind and his natural defenses were kicking in to overdrive. 

Cortana spoke softly. The sound spiked his headache again. “Chief, I’ve got a diagnosis.”

He finally clutched the doorframe of the power plant and paused for the world to settle. “Oh really?” 

“You’ve been poisoned.”

“Poisoned?”

“Food poisoning. From the yuck.”

“From the yuck.”

“That’s right.”

He rolled his shoulder off the doorway and stumbled unevenly into the main room. “Figures.”

“It‘ll be okay though, we can treat this, but we‘ve no time to waste. There are probably native plants that can help us... grasses, herbs, roots.... Do you have any of the elements you collected earlier that we could study and perhaps determine the source?”

“No.” He moved to the pedestal in the center near the radio hookup and leaned heavily over it. “There’s nothing left.”

“Do you remember what you found? Could you find it again?”

“Not right now.” He reached to the chip in the back of his head.

Cortana panicked. “Chief what are you doing?”

“Sorry.” He slipped the chip out and felt her coldness leave, taking a portion of his headache with her. The Chief plugged it into her holopad and dropped to his knees. 

Cortana shimmered to life before him. “Chief!?!”

“Get the beacon running again, I‘m checking out for a while.” He collapsed sideways onto the floor. “I’ll hunt for medicine later.”

“Chief, don’t leave me here!” She leaned over the edge of the pad. He lay below in a SPARTAN ball. “I can’t read your vitals from here! Please put me back in?”

“Start the beacon back up. Call for help. I’ll be right here.”

“Chief!”

“I’ll be right here...” His voice trailed off and he didn’t move again. 

“Chief?” Her voice shook. “Chief?” 

Separation was one thing, but his lack of motion scared her the most. Her voice was small and she couldn’t make it any louder. “Chief.....”

There was nothing to do but do as he said. She relaunched her distress call and sent it into space. ‘This is UNSC AI Cortana serial number CTN 0452-9 broadcasting on all open UNSC frequencies...’ She sent the prepared message to a subroutine. “Please hurry...”

She peered down at the collapsed super-soldier, whose bulky MJOLNIR armor masked evidence that he was even breathing. Tremors shook her to her code, a sensation so deep and troubling, she was afraid it was going to break her apart to a pile of ones and zeroes. 

“Chief... Put me back... I can’t feel you from here. Please.” She put her head on her hands. “I don’t want to be rescued if you’re not with me.” She shuddered again and realized it was a sob. “I love you.”

She didn’t try to suppress it now, whatever havoc her human-like emotions would inflict on her structure could go right ahead and happen. If she couldn’t save her SPARTAN, she was useless. Amid strangled sobs, an awful sense of destruction twisted deep inside her.

The black fingers of a gauntlet slipped up over the edge to her platform.

“Chief!” She reached forward, sensing the complex mesh of circuits and crystal just beneath the reinforced surface. Although she knew she couldn't hole him, she threw herself across his hand, desperate for stability. “You promised not to give up -- you promised not to die -- and I know you can’t control that, but I can’t go on without you. I don’t think I’ll survive. You can’t leave me.”

The external speakers in his helmet hissed out a heavy sigh. “I keep promises.”

“Chief...”

“You’re just...” He paused for a breath. “You’re going to have to give me some time.”

“Time?”

“Stop worrying yourself to death.”

She smiled through choked tears. Even now he was still the same Chief. “Okay.”

“Hold on for me, all right?” His fingers slipped, pulled by the weight of his arm. “Be here when I wake up.”

“I will.” She wished her grip could keep his hand up with her. “I’m sorry.”

“Promise me.”

She suddenly found a new strength of heart growing inside her. She calmed her fit of emotion and steadied her voice, sending it as strong as she could back down to him on the floor. “I promise.”

“Good.” 

His hand slipped off and back to his side.

She watched him grow still, fighting hard to be optimistic despite the outcomes from her logic center. They didn't matter. She had a job to do. 

He was going to wake up. They’d be together again, and when they were, she’d have the beacon running, and a ship would be waiting to pick him up and nurse him back to health. Not one ship -- a whole fleet of UNSC warcraft orbiting HK-154, answering her call. 

That’s what he’d see when he woke from this. 

That’s what she could do.


	25. Log25

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two Days

Two long days and nights passed and yellow light of a third dawn illuminated the high windows of the power plant. The beam cast among the floating dust and fell across the motionless suit of armor curled around the base of the holographic projection pad near the turbines. A status light blinked along its side.

‘This is UNSC AI Cortana serial number CTN 0452-9 broadcasting on all open UNSC frequencies...’

Sunlight warmed the interactive surface and Cortana phased back into shape. It was the same as the day before - another bright and silent morning with no movement anywhere on the surface of the abandoned globe. This place had been purged by the power of the Rings and over the last forty-eight hours, she realized exactly what that meant. Loneliness. Logically, it was the same as when she was abandoned in space with the master chief sealed in a cryo pod. Of course, back then she passed time reviewing logged Halo data, watching archived video, and monitoring the Master Chief’s vital signs.  
This time, over two years later, she could do none of those things.

She had no interest in the Halo data, she blamed it for all that had happened to them. She couldn’t find a lot of the archived video stored in her memory. Apparently it was subconsciously overwritten during the last year. And the Master Chief, her beloved John-117, was unresponsive less than a foot away.

Once an hour, she told herself. She’d limit her checks to once an hour to keep herself in check. It was officially 0500 and she approached the edge of her platform. Sunlight painted him like an impressionist canvas It was the same scene she found the previous hour. Nothing had changed. Cortana felt numb, stripped of everything that made her unique or special. How did she survive eighteen months this way? Every minute not checking the chief was a curse.

‘This is UNSC AI Cortana serial number CTN 0452-9 broadcasting on all open UNSC frequencies...’

Cortana left the distress beacon to its regular subroutine and prepared to shut down. She was no good here, but she was not giving up. She never would. Even if rescue never came - even if he died - she would carry on their promise. The Master Chief always kept his promises, and she wanted him remembered as the sarcastic, stubborn, trustworthy man he was, sincere and true to his word. A man she loved. She’d continue to check him every hour until the ships arrived. It was what he asked her to do, and she’d obey until she went rampant and died staring at him from above.

They weren't to that point yet. Cortana switched herself to standby and faded back into the safety of her storage chip.

Fifty-eight minutes passed and she activated herself again. The subroutine was going strong, no change there. The form on the floor was motionless, no change there. She moved to standby again and waited for the seconds to tick by.

0700 hours. White sunlight blazed in the windows. Lapping water echoed faintly from the shoreline. Cortana moved again to the side of the holo pad.

“Unngghh..”

Cortana froze. The Master Chief stirred. His helmet scraped across the concrete floor, one hand planted firm on beside it and he slid his shoulder from beneath him and lay still on his belly with his right arm pinned beneath him. She could hardly believe it had happened but for the evidence of her eyes. She was afraid to move for five minutes before he moved again. 

The pinned arm slid out and shoved the rest of him into a sitting position. The Spartan groaned again and cradled his head in his hands. “Stop screaming at me, Cortana.”

Her voice rasped and broke. “Chief?”

His head snapped toward her. “That’s not you.”

The Chief hosted to his feet and staggered against the pedestal. Cortana reached for him. "Chief, slow down. You're not well."

"I'm fine." He replied. “You can’t hear it, can you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Here, listen.” 

He yanked her chip from the pedestal and slipped it into his helmet. The first thing she did was launch a complete scan of everything working in both the suit and the soldier, then she paid attention to what it was he wanted her to hear. His two way radio system registered a coded transmission. She recognized it immediately. “Chief, it’s Covenant.”

“The Covenant’s gone.”

“Sangheili.”

He stumbled to the door. Hovering high above was the green bulb-headed shape of a Separatist Phantom drop ship. He collapsed heavily onto the doorframe. “Is this the fever playing tricks on me?”

“Your fever is gone, Chief.”

"Why aren't they landing?"

“We're no longer broadcasting from this location. I’ll utilize your onboard radio to transmit our position.” 

His jaw hung open inside his helmet, as he the ship arced gently against the cloudless sky. It bent toward them, hovered, and descended to their beachfront. It wasn’t until the ship landed that he gained control of his wonder. 

The hatch opened and a dozen nine-foot marched out. They wore full body armor, carrying semi-automatic covenant carbines, and scowling furiously behind their visors. Chief rose from the doorframe and they leveled their guns. 

The SPARTAN forgot awe and assessed the situation. The standard Elite load-out included sticky grenades and laser swords in addition to the carbines. He had one MA5B assault rifle across his back with 11 bullets and some orange flood gunk in it. Weakened as he was, he might be able to take out one or two, but the rest would easily overpower him. He made the safest choice he could - he raised hands in surrender.

The squad leader nodded and he was marched aboard the Phantom. They forced him into a seat in the loading zone, cavernous and dark compared to the powerplant and full of pale, artificial light. Hover lifts and engines whirred to life all around him. He switched off his external speakers and muttered to Cortana. “We haven't been rescued.“

“Huh?“

“We've been captured.“


	26. Log26

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The End

The Master Chief fell back to sleep in transit. With so many armed Sangheili casting dirty looks, regaining strength was his only strategy. The Phantom gained altitude and left the surface of HK-154 far behind. Cortana kept watch on both the man in the suit and the view on the observation screens. The slate gray sea stretched like a blanket over the planet's surface as topography vanished and landmasses lost definition. She planted visual markers on the island of Why and the nation of Cant. Other landmasses hugged the sides of the globe, including one of size that would have occupied the wandering Chief for years. Their crash site was still covered in rain clouds.

She ran a quick search to make sure the records she’d taken of the crash, Cant, the view from the top of their mountain and chronicles of their time were still safe in memory. They were. It was hard to tell now a days what was being unconsciously deleted from her files. It scared her deeply, but mostly made her sad.

The Sangheili soldiers whispered in their own gutteral language, casting the Chief sidelong looks. Not one of them had spoken directly to him or given him an explanation of any kind. This behavior made no sense to her. Their quasi-UNSC technology and marked armor betrayed them as Separatists. Therefore, they were supposed to be allies. Something must have happened between the Sangheili and the UNSC during the three years she and the Master Chief were stranded. She wished her partner was awake to talk the possibilities out.

Perhaps the war was still going even after the destruction of the Ark. The death of Truth effectively broke the Covenant, but not necessarily the warrior spirit of their opponents. She could easily see the Brutes carrying on with the fight, but that didn’t explain the Elites’ behavior, here.

Maybe the Arbiter died in the portal. This seemed plausible. If the Arbiter died when the Dawn broke apart, then the Sangheili could have blamed the Master Chief for his death and taken their outrage out on the human race. That would make the Chief a wanted man, which matched the situation they were in now to a ‘t’.

The curved horizon of the planet grew visible as the Phantom turned toward a single bulb-headed Assault Carrier. It flew through the open hatch in the orbiting ship and docked smoothly between two identical crafts in the tightly packed hangar. Cortana nudged her partner awake before their captors could.

He eased his head slowly up, taking an inconspicuous scan of the space. “Where are we?”

“I can’t access their records. An Assualt-class Carrier.”

“Suggestions?”

“Don’t make any sudden moves.”

The six waiting Sangheili guards ushered him up from his seat with the barrels of their carbines and walked him down the gangplank with his hands on his head. Waiting for him at the bottom were nearly a hundred other nine-foot aliens dressed in everything from full body armor to simple jumpsuit-looking crew uniforms. All of them wore scowls.

Used to tiny buildings and even tinier companions, the Chief felt vulnerably small, and the weakness of his illness nagged the back of his mind. None of the onlookers raised weapons but they all stared as he past as if he were the embodiment suffering. The door at the back of the hangar bleeped and slid open, releasing the Chief and his six wardens into a clean, slightly inclined hallway with arching plasma lights and iridescent purple plating. They moved through branching hallways, past more Sangheili workers who shot similar glares. It was all a bit overwhelming for the man who had grown used to living alone for years.

Cortana pulled up any files on Covenant Assualt Carriers she could find in her fragmented memory, but they were already too deep into the heart of the vessel for her recovered schematics to help. They were headed forward toward the bow and steadily upward, whether this was good or bad she had no idea. The caravan finally stopped at a set of double sliding doors. The hallway was wider than those on their way through the ship and the Chief didn’t need Cortana to tell him this wasn’t the prison level.

He shut off his external speakers and whispered to the woman in his head. “Do you know what this is?”

“I’m not sure, and I’m avoiding contact with the onboard computer... I don’t think they know I’m in here and I'd rather keep it that way.”

“You were the one calling for help.”

“I don’t want to be confiscated from you.”

The doors folded upward revealing a battle worn Elite Commander standing solemnly with his hands behind his back. He searched the captive's gold visor for signs of the man inside and spoke with a deep voice and a nod to his armed guard. “Stand by.”

The guard lowered their carbines and stepped back, letting the doors slide closed between them, and leaving the man and the alien alone in a dimly lit foyer space. The Chief slowly lowered his hands from his head and the Sangheili fixed him with a scrutinizing look. “SPARTAN 117?”

The Chief nodded.

The elite drew his head back, still skeptical. His wounded jaw clenching with the words. “I am the Master of this ship. The Captain has requested audience with you. Follow me.” He turned and headed for another, more elaborate set of sliding doors just behind. The Chief saw no reason not to follow.

The room beyond was an observation deck of massive proportions. Above them the stars of the universe unfolded in layers of brightness. The ship was nestled in the outermost reaches of the Milky Way galaxy. The center of the formation spun majestically above reaching with its diamond arm to cradle them and carry them through the majesty of space. On the horizon was HK-154, a glassy silver marble of shifting clouds and water. There was nothing familiar about it at this distance. He felt he‘d ascended to another plane, as if he‘d died on that island and left the world of mortality behind.  
Standing beneath the dome of glass and stars was the ship’s captain, light reflecting in pinpoints off his archaic silver armor. The Master Chief saw him and stopped in his tracks. The Ship Master hailed this new figure. “The SPARTAN is here, Captain.”  
  
The soldier in the starlight turned, his familiar voice answered briefly over his shoulder. “Leave us.”  
  
The ship master saluted and left. The Master Chief waited until the Captain finally turned. “Spartan.”  
  
“Arbiter.”  
  
The alien rushed forward arm outstretched. “I knew it. A warrior of such caliber does not leave this coil easily.” The Chief met him, took his hand and was unexpectedly pulled into the Sangheili equivalent of a hug. Their armors thunked off of each other. The Arbiter released him and stepped back for a closer inspection. “Are you yourself?”  
  
The Chief cocked his head. “What?”  
  
The Arbiter’s eyes smiled. “I can see you are. It seems hardly possible to kill you, Spartan, I am beginning to believe you are immortal.”  
  
“I promise that is definitely not the case.”  
  
“Officially, you have been pronounced dead. I attended your funeral.”  
  
The Chief smirked. “Did you cry?”  
  
The Arbiter smirked back. “It was very touching. They fired weapons. It was what you would have wanted.”  
  
“That’s protocol. It wasn't in my will.”  
  
The Arbiter’s gaze turned thoughtful. “Standing at the monument, with the photographs of other fallen soldiers set all around, I was troubled to find no sign of you there. In my experience, the fight we waged together was the turning point of the war. You won that battle for your species and I won it for mine. Together we brought closure to a sin that had existed for thousands of years. Yet you were not represented at all, no photographs, no medals, nothing.” He bowed his head briefly, then looked up again. “I scratched your service number into the side of that monument.”  
  
The Chief could feel the sense of pride and honor radiating from him even now.  
  
The Arbiter broke eye contact and moved to the windows. “Yet even as I did I had doubts. I was always of the belief that great warriors occupied a space in the heart of every soldier, and I felt that your loss would leave a greater void. I left your planet soon after, and picked up your distress beacon after many months of travel. That was when I knew you were alive, and I would not see you easily abandoned as your countrymen were content to do.”  
  
He turned to the Chief again. “I have already corrected their error.”  
  
“Thanks.” The Chief nodded. “For everything.”  
  
The Arbiter tilted his head. “There is something different about you. About the way you carry yourself. What happened on that planet for all this time?”  
  
“Nothing.” He answered with a bit of exasperation. “Absolutely nothing. Nothing happened from the minute we crash landed to five minutes before you picked me up, it was pure torture.”  
  
“You wear it well.” The Arbiter said. “What of Cortana?”  
  
“Right here!” She piped up.  
  
“Have you been listening this whole time?”  
  
“Of course. I was touched. I recorded it for posterity.”  
  
“You disgrace me.” The Arbiter said. “I have already lost the support of my crew. I have taken them nearly a year off course to rescue you. That is no petty sacrifice.”  
  
Her voice was smiling. “I’ll keep it to myself.”  
  
The Chief moved to stand beside him, staring out at the galaxy, his HUD immediately pinpointing the sector that held the planet Earth. “So what now?”  
  
“Consider yourself my personal guest.” The Arbiter said. “You will be given quarters and privileges and granted any wish you may have aboard my ship.”  
  
“And then?”  
  
The Arbiter took a deep breath. “Understand, Master Chief, my crew has been at war for much of their lives. We have not seen our home world in many years and I will not ask any more from them.” He looked to the Chief. “We are headed for Sangheilios. You can accompany us as an ambassador of peace if you wish, but I cannot return you to your own planet.”  
  
Cortana waited for the Master Chief’s response. To his surprise, he wasn’t the least bit disappointed. All he wanted right now was companionship and a shower, and to have his only living friend promise him both made up for any drawback. He could feel a warm feeling growing in him, and realized for the first time that his exile was finally over. “An ambassador of peace huh? Don‘t your people consider me some kind of demon?”  
  
The Arbiter grinned. “I can think of no finer candidate. It will give you a chance to clear your name.”  
  
“Good luck.” Cortana scoffed. “Talking is most definitely not his strong suit.”  
  
“I’ll just follow your instructions.”  
  
She glowed and flooded his head with warmth. “I’ll keep you safe.”  
  
“Then welcome aboard the Shadow of Intent, Master Chief.” The Arbiter said, gladly. “You are among friends, and I cannot express how good it is to see you again.”  
  
“Thank you, Arbiter.” Cortana said, cordially. “The Chief feels quite the same way.”  
~  
  
  
Fin


End file.
